Protonmail was identified as spam in Gmail

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway.<p>Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model.<p>But what can we do?

And at the same time there is an uptick in obvious spam that gmail mistakenly classifies as ham.<p>Recent example:<p>---<p>From: linda bartony &lt;linda.bartony151985@gmail.com&gt;<p>Hi jacquesmattheij Team,<p>Hope you are doing well.<p>My experts were analyzing your website and found that your website is not handling recent updates from search engines.<p>It’s a fact that having a website won’t make you bring in visitors. If you do not get higher search visibility, rankings, and organic search traffic, you may fall behind your competitors.<p>Google wants its visitors to have the best possible experience and these factors play an important role in determining your rank in SERP:<p><pre><code> 1. For most of the competitive keywords or phrases you rank beyond 100. 2. Your website is not ready for the upcoming responsive design update. 3. So many technical errors present on your website making it difficult to index. 4. Lack of theme-based quality backlinks. </code></pre> We follow a technically advanced and tested approach to adhere to the latest algorithmic updates. We will prepare an advanced digital marketing campaign to generate maximum traffic and enhance your ranking.<p>Sounds Interesting! Please reply to us back and our PR executives will get in touch, with a detailed analysis report without any obligation.<p>Best Regards,<p>Linda barony<p>---<p>It doesn&#x27;t get much more obvious than that, but hey, the origin is gmail so it must be good. Meanwhile, I can&#x27;t reliably send mail from my own email server to my gmail account without it routinely being classified as spam.

In other words, Gmail again blocks desired email based on the preferences of other Gmail users. Gmail is like a really toxic high school; you won&#x27;t do well if you are into things that the majority doesn&#x27;t like.

The problem comes from the giants using close source algorithms for mail filtering... yes, they are very efficient at filtering spam, but you have no way to align on their close source filtering process to make sure your email goes through&#x2F;not marked as spam. Ironically, I once in a while receive a spam from a gmail account, and it is not marked as spam.<p>I would also add we are the problem, we picked the giants because they are free and convenient. By doing so, we gave them way too much power over the email ecosystem and they can start making their own rules.<p>The only way forward in my opinion is moving out of these allegedly free services and making the internet user centric again by de-centralizing.

Nothing new to me, my friends often need to whitelist me. It&#x27;s been like this for years.

In the last couple of months I’ve been receiving enormous amounts of entirely obvious spam to the spam folder on gmail. Like it or not things are misclassified so you need to keep an eye on that folder. I’m now getting 10-20 spam emails a day about bitcoin, missed delivierie etc. it’s as if they have made a decision to not filter those entirely anymore.

I wish it was possible to let users manually white list domains.<p>Emails could contain some form of standard header to ask users if they want to white list&#x2F;add an address to their contact list, and other emails would be down as default.<p>I know email is a good protocol, but reading email headers made my eyes bleed.

One problem is that Spam is not a well-defined concept. There is criminal activity using harvested or generated addresses. And there is annoying marketing from perfectly legal organizations I have given my address to. I would prefer a spam filter that just handles the first case. I can handle the second case by filter rules or unsubscribing. The problem is that Gmail tries to solve both problems with one solution and the result just doesn&#x27;t work even close to reliably.

Gmail even flags all mail from Google as spam. To be fair in this case I am registered to Google with a different address that forwards into my gmail.

Click &quot;Not spam&quot;. It&#x27;s what it&#x27;s there for.<p>Not that I&#x27;m defending Gmail -- it&#x27;s spam filter is a menace to email.

funnilly enough, i still receive stuff like ; .recent - .0rDer .feeDBack. &#x2F; . . &#x2F; in my inbox. Thanks gmail!

Solution: Move away from Gmail.<p>I use both Gmail and Protonmail and slowly I am moving all by subscriptions&#x2F;accounts to Protonmail. I had no issues so far with my @pm.com address.