I don't know what is happening with Gmail but lately Gmail's aggressive spam filtering created a huge problem for me.<p>It was a reply I sent to an email yet Gmail somehow figured out it was spam and the other person never got it (which I learned after 1 week)<p>Two weeks before they sent the property tax notice (from the govt) in spam and had I missed that email there would have been a penalty.<p>This is a very old Gmail address almost 10 years or more so I don't know what's happening but I've stopped trusting Gmail altogether after this.<p>This spam thing is such a black box, so don't be like me and check your spam folder just like you check your inbox if you're on Gmail.<p>P.S. Also looking for a good alternative to gmail if anybody has some suggestions. Right now I've just created a filter to send all email to inbox.
> P.S. Also looking for a good alternative to gmail if anybody has some suggestions.<p>100% Fastmail. I've been on them for eight years now, after switching from a decade of Gmail. I've had zero complaints.<p>Switching from Gmail isn't even that bad - you can keep your Google account using your new email address as the ID, so that you can still use Docs and Drive and such. I wrote a short guide here: <a href="https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/" rel="nofollow">https://www.justus.ws/tech/how-to-ditch-gmail/</a>
I have the opposite problem recently where a very common class of spam (usually "you have won") just slips straight into my inbox no matter how many times I flag it. It looks so obviously like spam it's quite shocking it doesn't get picked up.
They marked one of my two "Google Calendar" notifications as spam, this weekend.<p>I think that "providing service to customers" was never very high on the list of priorities there, and has fallen off completely in the past few years.<p>Anybody working there who still has that as a priority is probably facing an uphill battle against management process and social issues to even open the conversation.
This is a radical idea, but this thread is full of continued abuse from what seems like an uncaring partner that is only getting worse so that seems to justify it: you guys and google need a divorce. I suggest fastmail but there are lots of decent options.
My home state’s (Texas) online ballot printing site for small counties got its mails to my GMail sent to spam in 2018 and 2020, and not even that far in 2022.<p>That domain doesn’t have SPF or DKIM configured, and the link to click for generating the ballot is HTTP and an IP address (not even a proper DNS name), so no wonder.<p>However, I’d expect those mails to be delivered anyway since I marked the address as safe each time, but here we are.
If it makes you happy I have same issue with Outlook.com, seems like some emails sent from me are never delivered which would not be so big issue, bigger problems is I am not receiving some emails at all, not even in junk e-mail.<p>My kid's pediatrician can't send me email despite being in safe senders list (he can receives emails from me but his email provider (one of the biggest in Czechia) is rejected), same goes with my wife's gynecologist, they received my emails, but I didn't receive their reply, had big issues to make appointment for her and even receive prescription they sent through e-mail (funnily I resorted to using gmail where I received prescription without any issues, sadly they don't send SMS like any other doctor I experienced), sometimes (but that's rare) I also won't receive company e-mail, though these emails work in 99.5% cases.<p>I have nobody to contact to deal with this issue. I wish I could completely disable any e-mail filtering, since I will rather deal with junk email than not receiving important emails, which is much worse issue my mailbox being blackhole.<p>Also both my Gmail and Outlook.com accounts are very old, Gmail maybe 15 years, Outlook maybe 10 years and I used to received emails from both addresses (pediatrician/gynecologist).
I’ve noticed gmail getting worse lately too. Hotmail as well, and I think even much more.<p>I’m not sure what’s happening and wonder if it’s just spammers being smarter.<p>I’ve had gmail since a few months after launch and spam seems worst this last year. Today I got two spam messages in my inbox offering to eliminate my energy bill.<p>And I’ve had OTP codes sent to spam.<p>This is particularly risky as my banks and pretty much everything are pushing paperless. And I had a mortgage company that wouldn’t ever send paper and was completely digital.
Still better than the filters that just invisibly destroy spam without ever telling you. (I'm looking at you namecheap and numerous others. And my aunt's isp that vaporised any incoming email containing the word chicken and had no one who could help. Most British isps have given up having email at all, the expertise has gone).
GMail recently put an email from my landlord about this year's lease renewal into the spam folder. I only knew it was there because he texted me a few days later asking for a response to the email. He was using the same email address he's used for the past five years for emails to me. There were no attachments. We've discussed lease renewal every year. No idea why GMail suddenly decided that email was spam but if he hadn't texted me, I never would have known to go looking for it.
> <i>P.S. Also looking for a good alternative to gmail if anybody has some suggestions.</i><p>We've been self-hosting. The first few weeks cost some extra time as you add items to the spam filters, but it works pretty well. Our system kills off about 1500 spam emails a day, probably 2-3 get through but most of those are obvious ("Your funding is approved for up to $700,000!!!" or "Did you get my previous email?")<p>edit: I should add that we're US based, so disallowing all domains besides .com, .edu, .org is easy and useful.
We've had our problems, but Fastmail does a pretty good job. Not perfect, sure, but I don't remember having to send an e-mail to spam in the last 2 years.<p>Or not receiving e-mails. Or recipients not receiving my emails. I had my doubts, because of the custom domain, but it's been ok until now.<p>I have it set up to load my gmail e-mails also and it filters spam messages that gmail missed. Meaning, I log in to gmail and see spam messages in the inbox, that never reacahed my Fastmail inbox. In the past months, with about 100% success rate.
> Two weeks before they sent the property tax notice (from the govt) in spam and had I missed that email there would have been a penalty.<p>To be fair, a lot of gov agencies suck at sending email. Lack of SPF, DKIM very likely DMARC is widespread.<p>> This spam thing is such a black box, so don't be like me and check your spam folder just like you check your inbox if you're on Gmail.<p>Tends to be that way, otherwise it'll get gamed really fast. Especially at Google's scale.<p>> P.S. Also looking for a good alternative to gmail if anybody has some suggestions.<p>There are plenty of good email providers, but spam filtering is an incredibly difficult problem. Don't expect miracles in that aspect.
I suspect it has something to do with Gmail's policy change on nov 2022 when they started requiring spf, dkim, and dmarc.<p>There are probably a ton of misconfigured domains and non-google email servers that interpret the new configurations slightly differently.
The "user as the product" model works well for the user for a while, when business is booming. I now pay Microsoft for email simply because they have someone answering the phone over there, competent or not. I get Office as part of the deal.
Feel like I'm an outlier, judging from other responses here - gmail spam filtering is amazing for me; I rarely get spam in my inbox, and I've just checked my spam folder and it was a nightmarish pool of, well, spam.
> Two weeks before they sent the property tax notice (from the govt) in spam and had I missed that email there would have been a penalty.<p>I'm guessing you already do something like this which is why you didn't miss it, but for those who would miss something important like this if the mail didn't come through there is a simple, widely available solution that a surprisingly large number of people overlook: a calendar.<p>Put recurring events on your calendar for things like property tax payments, domain registration renewals, SSL certificate renewals, etc, and get in the habit of taking a look at your calendar at least once a week.<p>Bonus tip: for domains that you intend to use long term register them for 10 years, and then every year add one year so the expiration is always 9 to 10 years out. That way if the price ever goes way up and you need to move to a cheaper domain you've got at least 9 years to complete the move.
Search in Gmail is bonkers too.<p>I can't even find mail back using a literal search for text that appears in a recent e-mail.<p>I thought Google was a search company ...
I gave up on Gmail spam filtering a few years ago and created a rule to send messages to inbox. I don't get that much spam, so it's not too bad. But then again, Gmail probably has some black-box filters that removes messages that I'll never see.<p>The real horror show is Outlook/live.com. The spam filter is super aggressive, and if you don't have the sender marked as a safe sender, it will get sent to spam. I've missed invoices, tax and government communication, important messages from friends I hadn't talked to in a while, invites to events, job offers, and more.<p>What's even worse is that Outlook automatically deletes messages in the spam folder every ten days. I don't always check my email frequently, so sometimes I'll never see an email before it is gone. There is no way to extend this period, or disable the spam filtering functionality altogether.<p>Outlook might be free, but it has cost me a lot.<p>When I open up outlook, the first place I go to is the spam folder, because that is where the important emails are. At one time, I even had a reminder in my calendar to check the spam box every few days. It's such an user-hostile way to do spam filtering, as it forces me to pay _more_ attention to spam. I'd rather just have them dump everything in my inbox, and deal with it myself.<p>I think it's about time that I moved away from these email services.
This is a well-known problem in the industry. Gmail's spam filtering is a black box with no apparent way to prevent emails from randomly ending up in spam.
I have had Google's own Google Drive notifications land in my Gmail spam. Crazy to think Gmail used to be best-of-class when it came to spam detection.
Was excited to see this post thinking maybe it's not just me lately, alas it looks like you have the opposite problem. I've had a Gmail Business email for well over a decade and usually I could count the number of spam emails that went into my inbox every year on one hand, as I make sure not to subscribe to anything and unsubscribe if I do. Past year or so, now get several a month at least which may not sound like a lot, but just things that are obviously spam, or recruitment emails etc. And it's bit annoying since I use third party email clients and I'm told marking as spam in those doesn't do the same as marking in spam in a gmail client, so I have to always then open up gmail.com and mark as spam there. But yes, guess glad don't have the opposite problem as a couple spam is a hassle but a couple real emails not coming through could be a far bigger problem, since many of us have rarely needed to check the spam folder often unless something we are expecting didn't show up.
>This is a very old Gmail address almost 10 years or more so I don't know what's happening but I've stopped trusting Gmail altogether after this.<p>I haven't "trusted" Gmail (except to stay online) for a lot longer than 10 years (and my 'main' Gmail address goes back to when it was invite-only almost 19 years ago)
A member of our hackerspace recently missed the announcement email that some of his stuff had been tagged as abandoned. The other similar announcement of someone else's abandoned stuff, literally 3 minutes earlier, landed in his inbox, but the important one was flagged as spam.<p>And there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust it.
Definitely. I think Gmail spam filtering has just gone haywire with way too much input, ChatGPT style sales pitches, and too much clutter.<p>At Skiff (<a href="https://skiff.com/mail" rel="nofollow">https://skiff.com/mail</a>), we use RSPAMD (<a href="https://rspamd.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rspamd.com/</a>), an open-source spam filtering framework. It's not as sophisticated, but it is highly explainable and works consistently. I much prefer this + inbox rules to anything else.
I worked with a small business using a paid GSuite membership, and occasionally an email from one of us in the organization to another member of the same org (and domain) would end up in spam.<p>This happened more than once, and the emails were not even special or odd.<p>But regardless of the content, an email from one member of the company should be reliably received by another.<p>This and other reasons led me to move the client and future clients to Zoho. Not only have I not had problems with Zoho, but when I had a question I got prompt support from a human.
This can happen even with the best filter, as long as there is some dynamic outside your control. For me, it always flags the newsletter from the Elite Dangerous-makers (Frontier Games?). And even after setting a filter with the flag to not handle it as spam, it still gets a warning of being a potential flag in the mail-view. That's just the world of our new AI-Overlords. Just cope with it, always check your spam-folder and be nice to the bots.
A perfect anti-spam solution doesn't exist.<p>Even if you switch e-mail provider, as long as they're also using some sort of anti-spam system, false positives will always happen occasionally.<p>The obvious recommendation is to always add any trusted senders to your contacts or, as you've already done, create some filters.<p>Alternatively, switch to a provider that doesn't use any spam filtering at all. But that will open up a whole different can of worms.
Wow, so glad to have seen this conversation. I checked my gmail spam folder as a result, and saw a message from someone I haven't talked with recently, but have definitely emailed with in the past. As others have noted, prior bilateral emailing should be a very strong signal that a message is not spam. I will make a habit of checking my gmail spam folder at least monthly...
> P.S. Also looking for a good alternative to gmail if anybody has some suggestions.<p>Happy Migadu user here. No free tier, but it's just no nonsense hosting.
I've been having this issue for years, with some really awful misses on the part of Google. For example emails from relatives whose emails I almost always respond to sometimes get spam binned. Why?! God know how many valid emails have been lost over the years because I forgot to check the spam folder for a while.
My Google workspace email managed to flag as spam an email coming from Google Domains letting me know about a renewal.<p>Spam filters are bizarre. Sometimes something completely normal lands in spam. Sometimes something that’s clearly spam lands in my inbox.<p>I just got used to check the spam folder every couple of weeks just in case.
"We're Number One; why bother to try harder?"<p>I would suspect GMail is costing Big G more than they're making out of it, and they're trying to gently shove users off the platform, but they've never had any problem simply closing a popular service.
Can't be worse the MS Defender. It's either blocking innocuous emails from well known senders (a Dropbox access code for example) or completely failing to detect obvious fraud and phishing attack emails, sometimes with embedded code fragments.
That’s the state of Web 2.0 I guess? Google also plans to rank AI-aided good content lower than thin blog posts that have contributed to SEO spam.<p>It’s like, earlier we had ads and subscriptions. Now AI is a new business model. But I think it needs Web3.0
If your emails are anything like your posts then maybe gmail is right to flag them as spam.<p>The age of your address has little effect. It is very common to check your spam folder once in awhile, especially if something like a govt notice coming thru. Part of the problem is what ppl are putting in their emails, like the govt notice -- attachments? a bunch of links and nothing more? It looks sketchy.<p>Spam is a big problem yes but the fight against it is constantly evolving so of course some things fall through cracks. This isn't new. Many systems (including gmail's) are quite good at flagging things that look like spam -- "look like". A little training and unfortunately a little less mail coming from certain bad actors and you will see totally different results.
my gmail filters started blowing up some time ago -- a year or two?<p>i variously deactivated some/all/etc., re-activated, re-created, broke-out, aggregated, etc.<p>none of it really seems to matter.<p>i don't actually get a lot of mail, i just stopped checking all day every day, so i started missing a lot of stuff b/c i would just never catch up.
Gmail spam filtering has never worked. Even after "training" the spam filter for months on end it still filtered obviously good messages to spam. Now I download everything, do the spam filtering locally, and read it through mutt.
For me the most egregious way that Gmail is failing recently is that its search 100% sucks. It sucks in a way that's almost unimaginable. It uses fuzzy matching and single words when you use multiple terms.<p>I search "stock transfer" to find an email in my main mail from last week. It returns dozens of junk emails from my "updates" and "promotions" folders that just contain the words "share" ("share your recipes!") or "security" ("update your home security") or "inventory" (??).<p>Whatever happened to the promise of Gmail (I remember 2004) that folders and tagging were a thing of the past, that you could use the awesome power of Google to "just search" and the email you wanted would pop up? What happened to the Google that claimed to know whether your search for "bass" was for the fish or the guitar? Now it can't even tell that a search for "stock transfers" is not for "share your recipes?"<p>And yes, I know I can use quotes. Searching email shouldn't be something only the power users know how to do.