[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing
Gmail's filters?
For the past weeks I've been receiving emails that are pretty
obviously spam. Here's one I just got: sender: Dinasii Kolpakov
<kolpakovdinasij@gmail.com> subject: Q7425 7235 F0 8741 (empty
body) They all have similar formats, with a .htm attached file
with ridiculous names like "Elon secret invitation" or "how to get
free bitcoin". They are all look like 90's era spam. Yet not only
aren't they caught in the spam filter, they arrive to my main
inbox, they aren't even classified as promotions or anything. I
can also see a long CC list, since it's not hidden. Are any of you
also having a similar problem?
Author : kace91
Score : 243 points
Date : 2021-09-23 21:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
| thebean11 wrote:
| Yes, exactly the same type of stuff. And the other day a
| legitimate email from a company I was interviewing with (from an
| email address I have had _two way communication with_ ) got
| marked as a promotion.
|
| Something's up here.
| 0xFreebie wrote:
| I've recently had the experience of getting a spam email that
| allowed the spammer to add an appointment to my Google Calendar
| without my permission - even though I never enabled such a
| feature, never communicated with the sender before, and didn't
| reply or star or have them in my contacts. Wtf.
| MrMember wrote:
| Google will automatically add meeting invites to your calendar
| even if you don't accept them. You have to disable multiple
| options in both Gmail and Google calendar to stop this from
| happening. It is default behavior.
| awb wrote:
| Yes, it seemed to coincide with a notification I got that my
| Email was exposed on the dark web as a result of some hack. I
| forget which one but it was about 6-8 weeks ago I think.
|
| I keep marking them as spam but more keep coming. About 1-2 per
| day and of varying content but similar visual layout. 90s era
| spam is a good description.
| eitland wrote:
| Google crumbling under its own weight in yet another area.
| snihalani wrote:
| +1
| tclancy wrote:
| Yes, I keep getting a bunch of "Your GEICO quote 1234"
| variations. My thought is spam is like weather fronts at this
| point: while it feels like that subject line should be obviously
| flagged up, there is probably some other storm of porn bot spam
| that is causing the machine learning or filters to bend in just
| such a way that the car insurance spam can seep through.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| I'm getting those too - and the content is an obvious low-res
| image, not sure how it's getting through.
| MrMember wrote:
| I've been getting the same one. I mark each as spam but that
| doesn't seem to do anything.
| atuladhar wrote:
| +1. In my case, it's not that many, maybe a few a week but enough
| for me to notice it. Most of them are offering "Free Online
| Quote" for car insurance and such.
| eh9 wrote:
| I've honestly been wondering if IT has started testing my
| personal email account to make sure I don't fall for fishing
| scams.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes loads of it
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Glad to see this posted, I got the _exact_ same email this
| morning: Russian name from a Gmail account, subject that looks
| just like that (i.e. "long license plate number") and a .htm
| file. Was very surprised to see it get through GMail's filters.
| fistynuts wrote:
| Yes, I only mentioned it today to two coworkers who hadn't seen
| it on their mailboxes. I've been getting a few a week, some go to
| spam and some don't.
| dqv wrote:
| Yes. I send them to abuse@ every time I get them.
| gotrythis wrote:
| Lately, I've been noticing emails getting flagged as spam that
| are:
|
| a) replies to emails I sent b) have anything to do with topics
| I'm actively involved with c) from senders who I have marked as
| not spam dozens of times
|
| I never used to check the spam filter, now I do almost daily.
| sayhar wrote:
| SAME. It's awful.
| ulshv wrote:
| +1 I have the same issue, receiving similar emails every day with
| iOS notification
| sneak wrote:
| It's astounding to me that the default behavior on the gmail
| app is to actually push notify on every email, and that
| millions and millions of people leave this on.
|
| Phones must be insufferable for most people.
| kace91 wrote:
| It's not every email, it's just the ones in the main inbox
| (as opposed to notifications, promotions, social, etc). At
| least for me, it usually maps almost perfectly with human-
| sent emails, so it's a good feature because I very rarely
| check my email manually.
|
| It's pretty rare for me to receive more than a couple
| notifications a week at most.
| ghuin wrote:
| At least with iOS you get asked the first time you install an
| app whether you want notifications or not. Android allows
| them by default, and apps are not shy to spam you to get to
| open them.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| For the last year or so I've noticed an increasing amount of my
| legitimate professional interactions going into my "Promotions"
| tab in Gmail. The effect of which has been, after discovering a
| few mishaps of this sort, to now regularly and meticulously go
| through a massive pile of "Promotions" just to make sure I
| haven't missed something legitimately urgent or important. Prior
| to Google's classification errors producing this particular
| anxiety I used to basically treat the "Promotions" tab as spam to
| never look at. Now I'm going through all of it with prejudice
| which means I'm waaaaaaay more aware of marketing drivel than I
| used to be. As such, I'm pretty sure this "error" is intentional
| on Google's part to produce exactly this outcome of drawing
| eyeballs to inbox advertising.
| uclastudent1000 wrote:
| Just made an account to let you know that this specific comment
| made me check my Promotions tab, which happened to contain...
| an invitation to schedule a software engineering interview.
| Would definitely have missed that if I didn't get bored and
| read this HN thread midway through my lecture.
| labria wrote:
| I just disable this filtering. It's more damage than good
| nowadays...
| taftster wrote:
| Nowadays? Try day one. I always thought of this as a
| misfeature and disabled it from the start. I have no idea how
| this would be useful to me.
| dntrkv wrote:
| For me, it's been the single greatest boost to email
| productivity. It works great 99%+ of the time for me where
| I only keep any eye on Updates and Primary, and maybe once
| a week clear out the Promotions tab. Forums and Social I
| can usually clear out without even looking.
|
| Interesting how people can have such different experiences.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| sort of this: i treated the Promotions tab as a
| "unsubscribe from these mailing lists ASAP" tab as soon
| as the category feature came out
|
| i get so few of them now i removed all those extra tabs
| and filters a year ago, but it was pretty useful to get
| my total inbox as clean as it is now :)
| taftster wrote:
| Right, exactly. I want my "promotions" to land square one
| in my inbox, because then I'm going to deal with them
| right then and there. Unsubscribe comes first. A filter
| comes next, if they keep sending.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Classical AI (i.e. manually-constructed email rules) is
| much better for this kind of thing, in my experience. You
| don't get _spurious_ false positives; you can predict
| every false positive in your head before you even get the
| email, and if you want you can even add an extra rule to
| prevent it from happening in the first place!
|
| "Unknown / trusted / spam senders" lists are a basic
| implementation of this concept.
| gmadsen wrote:
| I get quite a bit of emails that are not completely spam,
| but by no means urgent to see. The filtering has been great
| to let me focus on things I need to see immediately,
| without having to scroll through 50 different promotional
| things
| znpy wrote:
| If you didn't realize it, Google has managed to get you to
| waster your time actually going through advertising (instead of
| putting that on the side for you).
|
| I'm really surprised most people aren't realizing this.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Huh. I thought it had something to do with my subscription to
| oss-security (the plain-text email causing some confusion in
| the filters). But clearly it's not just me...
| murbard2 wrote:
| Yes, I've been getting a bunch for the past week or so.
| i_made_a_name wrote:
| Yes, very noticeable. For me, it is exclusively @gmail.com
| addresses that get through.
| pvinis wrote:
| yep. I am starting to get very annoyed with it .
| PeterisP wrote:
| I had trouble that for one of my addresses forwarding to my gmail
| account systematically _all_ of them got sent to spam, even if it
| 's literally a reply to a message that I sent from gmail and
| repeatedly set "not spam" at it. In the end the only thing that
| worked was to add an explicit filtering rule saying "never send
| to spam" for that address.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Yes I can like 20 of those per day all to my primary inbox
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| This is what decline looks like
| Avamander wrote:
| Has always been a cat and mouse game with things shaking
| sometimes.
| jmcphers wrote:
| I have exactly the opposite problem: tons of legitimate email is
| getting flagged as Spam by GMail.
|
| It's now happening regularly with emails from people _in my
| contacts_ with whom I _regularly exchange messages_.
|
| Mind-boggling. I know spam filtering is a hard problem, but these
| are just obvious misses.
| moosedev wrote:
| Same. I'd gotten out of the habit of checking my Spam folder,
| having trusted Gmail to get it "correct enough" for years. But
| I looked recently and was amazed/horrified how much legitimate
| email was in there, including a friend's birthday event
| invitation that I would otherwise have missed.
|
| 20% of what is in my "Spam" folder today is what I'd call
| "spam" in the classical 90s/2000s-internet sense. Obvious
| trash/scam stuff, usually sex-related.
|
| Most of the rest of my "Spam" looks like what Gmail usually
| just labels Promotions. It's mail from legitimate organizations
| that I did indeed give my email address to and have a
| reasonable expectation of getting semi-regular email from, even
| if it's just trying to sell me more stuff. The Promotions auto-
| labeling works (worked) just fine for managing that stuff.
|
| I figured enough users are clicking the "Spam" button on enough
| "legit promotional" email from real organizations that they did
| agree to receive email from, that Gmail just started
| classifying it all as spam, and now doesn't/can't distinguish
| between "classic" spam and "annoying emails I can't be bothered
| to unsubscribe from". Sort of a tragedy of the commons of
| crowd-sourced spam filtering. But maybe there's a better
| explanation.
| thisjustinm wrote:
| This ^ see my comment about our experience fighting this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636281
| rconti wrote:
| GMail's spam filter no longer seems to have any intelligence.
| It's just a slider. Mark the obvious "Car insurance- 15324"
| subject message spam, and you know for a fact that immediately
| a bunch of legitimate mail will start getting flagged as spam.
| Mark that stuff as "not spam" and now you're back to getting
| obvious spam in your inbox.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I don't understand how to get Gmail to stop marking emails from
| my contacts as spam.
|
| Funny enough, the mails it penalizes worst are GMail addresses
| for small businesses, like my vet or the pizza shop.
| skinkestek wrote:
| If this is company mail you might have a colleague who uses the
| spam button instead of delete.
|
| I once caught my boss doing this (he was not a native English
| speaker, but absolutely used to communicating in English so it
| shocked me.)
| gtirloni wrote:
| Hmm so this is indeed a thing. I operate some email servers
| and often get spam notifications from, say, Hotmail, and the
| emails are always legitimate. It's like some people don't
| bother unsubscribing from lists, they just start reporting it
| as spam hoping it will go away.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| If a button is hard to find or it doesn't directly
| unsubcribe me, I just report the email as spam.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I used to be naive and actually unsubscribe from things but
| it stopped working about 10 years ago so I haven't bothered
| since.
| zebracanevra wrote:
| I was getting multiple emails like this per day a couple of weeks
| ago: https://i.imgur.com/m8nmpTr.png
|
| But they seem to have stopped... for now. It was quite
| aggravating.
| HighChaparral wrote:
| Yes. After literally years of never having to worry about gmail
| spam, really obvious stuff has been coming in for the last few
| months.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I've been having a batch of really obvious spam getting past
| Hotmail's filtering. After years of Hotmail being bad, Microsoft
| got really good at spam filtering there and I haven't really had
| issues with spam for close on a decade. It rarely hits my inbox.
|
| This last month, maybe two, I've had extremely obvious spam hit
| my inbox repeatedly. Picking two cases from today, the subject is
| the same "FWD: FINAL CALL", from two different senders, "A P P L
| E" and "NET FLIX". The pattern is pretty much always the same,
| it's immediately obvious that it's spam. No idea why it's
| slipping past when they're still catching hundreds a day (I've
| had this hotmail account from the early days of the platform,
| used it a bunch all over the place)
| loo wrote:
| Yes. Some reaching the Primary box.
| NavinF wrote:
| Yep, got one 3 days ago that matches your description perfectly.
| Russian sender name, HTML attachment about Elon/Bitcoin, etc.
|
| Maybe these emails are coming from real users that got hacked?
| That's probably the easiest way to get past the filter.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I wonder if they could have their bots email one another a lot
| and continually mark their messages as "not spam" until the
| Google system learns to trust them.
|
| I have also been getting several of these super obvious spam
| mail messages recently.
| d--b wrote:
| Yep, got them for a few days last month, then they got caught
| properly
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Not really a new issue. I have an old Gmail account that I don't
| use as my primary email anymore. However since it's still
| attached to some services that use Google SSO I have reason to
| check it occassionally. The amount of spam that makes its way
| pass the Gmail filter is on the order of hundreds of emails a
| week. Fastmail on the other hand seem to do a lot better,
| generally only 1-2 spam making its way to my inbox a day, and
| never any legitimate mail marked as spam in the several years
| I've used them. Even Outlook (which I use at work) seems to do a
| lot better although it sends legitimate emails to my spam folder
| more than I'd like. YMMV.
| silisili wrote:
| Yes. I suddenly just started getting tons and tons of German
| spam.
|
| I tried Googling for a way to block mail in a language or from a
| country, but apparently the technology just isn't there to do
| so(/s). Getting rid of Russian and German mail would completely
| fix my spam problem.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Nah they'd have to develop a whole system that can
| automatically detect a text's language. For example, to
| recognize what language to translate to/from without having to
| be manually selected.
|
| We're out of luck until then.
| steanne wrote:
| oh no, they have it. i know they do: i get a lot of spam in
| french because of my user name, and not much else on that
| account. i recently had legit email in english be flagged as
| spam and gmail had a "why is this message marked spam?" note
| on it that said it was not in my usual language.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Yes, but also getting obvious non-spam going to spam, likewise
| with it being categorized as Promotions. It got to a point that I
| don't filter by Category now, I just have a standard 'Inbox' with
| Starred at the top.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Oops. I forgot to negate my if test.
| drstewart wrote:
| Yep. This has happened a few times over the years and always
| seems to resolve after a while. I guess in the eternal game of
| cat and mouse in the world of spammers, sometimes the mouse gets
| the cheese.
| giarc wrote:
| Yes - I commented about the same awhile ago. How are spam filters
| not grabbing these "Amazon gift card" offers like the one I
| received below.
|
| https://imgur.com/4efNttg
| thisjustinm wrote:
| Yes, and I think it's related to an issue from earlier in July
| where gmail spam got way too strict.
|
| Here's a thread where I walk through our hassle trying to get
| Gsuite support to try to acknowledge they even consider this an
| issue, let alone do something about it:
| https://twitter.com/JustinMcCammon/status/141761476919279206...
|
| tldr; remove all bit.ly links from your emails
|
| Google has massively messed up spam filters and we got
| confirmation that they are aware of the issue from Gsuite support
| (although it seemed like Google did not consider it a problem and
| was just the absolute worst to try to work with via support.
| Absolutely terrible at every interaction except one rep who had
| to fight the system to help us investigate).
|
| We use Gsuite at work and ran into issues where in the middle of
| an email thread, with contacts we'd exchanged dozens of messages
| over many weeks and even months, suddenly the emails were being
| sent to our spam folder or worse, rejected entirely (which ends
| up being a silent failure unless you are really on top of your
| email logs or you have clients that pick up the phone and say
| "why haven't you responded to my email?" we had the latter).
|
| We reach out and spent weeks going back and forth daily with
| Google "support". I'd spend hours on the phone with them going
| through steps to recreate it and trying to find workarounds.
| Aside from one good rep who acknowledged many other people were
| writing in about it at the same time we were it really seemed
| like Google could not care less.
|
| At one point I got so desperate I searched on twitter to find
| other people complaining about things. I found a person who was
| willing to help me - she was on the other side of things -
| someone NOT using gmail trying to send emails to gmail users and
| getting the rejection bouncebacks all of a sudden. She helped me
| figure out some of the root causes. Turns out Google decided that
| all bit.ly links were bad and if one appeared in your email it
| was either rejected or sent to spam (we couldn't figure out why
| one or the other). With her help we figured out clear steps to
| reproduce the issue and I did so on emails I controlled to send
| all the email headers and such to Google thinking they would
| realize the obvious issue.
|
| Turns out we had bit.ly links in our own company email signature
| and so what was happening is when a client would reply to our
| email and it would include our own signature in it then google
| would flag that email as bad.
|
| In addition there were some cases where links to google docs or
| youtube (the irony!) were also getting flagged.
|
| The only thing we did that worked was to set up custom exception
| rules in gsuite to always allow emails through that contained
| bit.ly links or gdoc links as well as turn off ALL spam
| filtering. Naturally we all got lots more spam but we also could
| get regular emails again, which was much appreciated.
|
| I had a phone convo with someone at bit.ly since I figured they
| might like to know and maybe could apply some pressure to google
| but after running it up the ladder there they ghosted me.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I've been getting email-to-sms texts at odd hours from gmail
| addresses for a while now.
|
| We get tons and tons of gmail spam inbound to our non-gmail email
| server - every single day for years.
|
| If I complain to Google we get more, its uncanny.
|
| Seriously, fuck Gmail. Gmail can die in fire. Biggest spam
| service on the internet.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yes, but fortunately on a secondary account. My main account
| still seems to be safe from it, but my secondary account has been
| getting spammed to hell the past week. CCs are the same username
| @ aol.com and other domains, which is amusing because those
| aren't domains I've ever used (with that username, and I haven't
| used AOL since 1995 or so).
| pmlnr wrote:
| Yet legitimate mail from my server with valid DKIM, DMARC, SPF,
| PTR record, decade old domain lands in spam. Good job, AI first
| Google/Gmail.
| vgeek wrote:
| Who is to say that it isn't working as intended in building a
| higher wall around their ad garden? There should be a way for
| them to accept mail from self hosted users, or even provide
| some sort of testing tools (perhaps validated by credit card
| some type of bar to increase accountability? At least an RBL or
| something) for those who do, but nope.
| upofadown wrote:
| I am beginning to think that the simplest explanation is the
| most likely one. Google is just bad at stuff...
|
| If this was all part of some clever conspiracy then it would
| be, well, more clever...
| schappim wrote:
| "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately
| explained by stupidity", except for the "promotions tab",
| that was clear malice to increase their ads revenue.
| remus wrote:
| Or more simple still, it's a hard problem to solve and when
| there's billions of emails flowing through the pipeline
| every hour small mistakes can look big to individual users.
| fay59 wrote:
| Same as with gaming search, it's possible that spammers
| are catching up with the Google smarts, and from this
| point it's unclear how to proceed.
| rastafang wrote:
| Yes, looks like Russian text with attachments... About daily.
| slig wrote:
| I'm very surprised to hear that I'm not the only one getting
| spams in my inbox and legitimate emails in the spam folder for
| more than a month.
|
| I thought that Google had some sort of metrics and would spot
| this issue if it was widespread, but it seems they don't even
| bother.
|
| Do they even care about Google search and GMail? They're getting
| worse and worse.
| flowerlad wrote:
| In my case, the spam that manages to evade Gmail's filters
| contain an image as the body instead of text.
|
| Fun fact: Back in 2002 ycombinator founder Paul Graham wrote an
| article on spam filtering. (See
| http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html ). I emailed him that his
| method can be defeated by sending an image of the text, as
| opposed to the text itself. PG replied and pointed me to this
| FAQ: http://www.paulgraham.com/spamfaq.html
|
| In the FAQ there is an entry named "What if spammers sent their
| messages as images?" The answer indicates that is not going to be
| an issue, because there's still plenty of signals to go by.
|
| Guess PG was wrong!
| marshallford wrote:
| Yes! Glad to hear I'm not going crazy.
| dopamean wrote:
| I've gotten one of these every few days for the last couple
| weeks. It's bizarre. I report all as spam and haven't gotten one
| since Friday.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's still better than Outlook which regularly sends legitimate
| emails into the spam folder.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Gmail's Chat now has a feature to forward an individual message
| to your inbox. I kept clicking on that feature and all the
| forwards from Google were in the Gmail Spam folder.
|
| Gargh.
| er4hn wrote:
| That just sounds like poor cooperation between teams.
| adflux wrote:
| Yes I get these exact emails, also get added to Google docs
| Ristovski wrote:
| Have gotten multiple such emails the last couple of weeks.
|
| I think Googles spam detection is a bit too much lax when the
| sender itself is using gmail.
|
| These might as well be hacked accounts which have already proven
| themselves to be valid and "human" at a previous point in time? I
| doubt gmails spam detection would let a brand new account spam
| CC'd emails without any sort of detection.
| retox wrote:
| Yes, it started in the last 3-4 days. I was going to ask on here
| if there were any high-profile data breaches recently. I never
| used Epik.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Yes, for me, gmail spam getting into my inbox increased from zero
| to one or two per day a few weeks ago.
|
| It's very obvious; I'm sure the gmail team must know about it.
| I'd be curious to know whether they're planning on returning the
| spam detection back to the previous low false-negative rate.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I'm sure the gmail team must know about it.
|
| Of course they do. Its from all of the phone calls they've been
| receiving from their help lines and helpfully answering? Or
| maybe the bank of humans they have responding to emails sent to
| support.
| znpy wrote:
| I've been receiving spam for years in Gmail.
|
| Some years ago a not so bright product manager decided that dots
| are not important.
|
| My address used to be surname.name@gmail.com, and I've been
| receiving email for surnamename@gmail.com for years.
| modeless wrote:
| I'll be the one to say no, I haven't had any spam in my inbox
| recently. No false positives either.
|
| I find that every year or two there's a spammer that figures out
| a new technique and gets a couple of emails past the filter, but
| usually no more than a couple, and none recently. I don't see a
| trend toward less or more effectiveness of spam filtering
| overall.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Just got that exact email moments ago.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| Yes, very obvious bitcoin scams with html attachments that try to
| execute script to redirect you to another webpage
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Yup, definitely. It's a relatively new thing, and the stuff
| that's getting through looks more and more obviously like spam
|
| Very weird to see the spam filter be obviously and dramatically
| worse than it was 10 years ago. Are they about to move to a paid
| model for Gmail? Hehe
| h2odragon wrote:
| Seen it too.
|
| It must be all the pesky Russian disinformation that's
| everywhere, right? Surely google wouldn't tweak an algorithm to
| further anyone's narrative?
| graeme wrote:
| I've gotten a ton of spam and marking it as spam doesn't seem to
| help. Gmail getting less workable
| filleokus wrote:
| YES! I posted about this two weeks ago, one person agreed but the
| post never got any traction:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437472
|
| I haven't heard anything about this when I asked colleagues / IRL
| friends... I wonder what is going on over at Google
| kace91 wrote:
| Well that's good to hear, I can't find any mention about this
| problem anywhere and I was starting to think that I was being
| specifically targeted.
|
| Except for the last one, all the calls to action seem to be
| crypto related, but I don't know if that's relevant to the
| origin of this attack. Perhaps it's just the most successful
| way of getting clicks nowadays (?).
|
| It's baffling that google are letting these ones slip. Even
| marking some as spam does nothing to prevent new ones from
| coming.
| natch wrote:
| > It's baffling that google are letting these ones slip.
|
| Why would it be baffling? Google's spam filters have always
| been extremely low quality, even mistaking email generated by
| Google itself as spam. They simply don't have the pride of
| craftsmanship to improve it.
| encoderer wrote:
| You live in a different universe than I do. Fascinating.
|
| In my world, spam was a true problem that was killing
| email. Truly killing it. You would have to create a new
| address every 6 months to stay ahead of the spam and have a
| functioning inbox. Very different world.
|
| Gmail fixed that. And for me, there have been issues from
| time to time and in fact i am getting this very spam
| myself, but gmail permanently stopped the hordes for me in
| 2004.
|
| Now, don't get me started on their insane categorization
| choices.
| luis8 wrote:
| I just got one like this 5 minutes ago. They are getting clever i
| saw that they are embedding this.
|
| onload="document.location.replace(window.atob('aHR0cHM6Ly9ibG9jay
| 1jaGFpbi1ib3gudGsvbXpwaWwvP3RldHRoa3Yg'));"
|
| Which if you decode you get a strange domain.
|
| I assume gmail only looks for urls which in this case is not
| visible without decoding it
| gruez wrote:
| I thought you couldn't embed scripts/iframes into a html email?
| eh9 wrote:
| These emails often include an attachment with an HTML file.
| My guess is depending on your client, it might just open a
| new browser window with the file (after it's downloaded)
| luis8 wrote:
| It is in an attached file. In my case the file is named
|
| "Profitability 28388 .htm"
| Tommah wrote:
| Funny story: A week ago, I received an email from a website
| monitoring service saying that my site was up. I wondered for a
| second why I didn't get an email saying that my site had been
| down first. Eventually I realized that I probably did get it, but
| it went into my Gmail spam. Sure enough, I checked my spam
| folder, and there it was.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yes, and don't forget to check your spam folder regularly because
| a bunch of legit email ends up in there too.
| quag wrote:
| Thanks. Just found a bunch of legit emails. Perhaps HN needs a
| monthly banner that says: check your Spam folder for real email
| before it expires for this month!
| nathancahill wrote:
| Couldn't believe how many legit emails were in there. Missed a
| handful of important emails and who knows how many more, since
| they're deleted after 30 days.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Couldn't believe how many legit emails were in there. Missed
| a handful of important emails and who knows how many more,
| since they're deleted after 30 days.
|
| The administrator of my email servers has a vested interest
| in making sure I get all _valid_ emails and in junking the
| garbage.
|
| Gmail administrators are interested in pleasing their boss
| and getting paid -- the quality of their spam filters and
| especially _your_ interests aren 't even in their top ten
| important issues.
|
| The only problem with my set up is that if my email
| administrator gets bored, I'm screwed. Fortunately, that's
| unlikely as _I_ am _my_ email administrator.
|
| I expect that many folks will dismiss this email as just some
| rando who doesn't understand just how _important_ it is to
| have gmail or some other provider 's email service because
| _reasons_.
|
| But the truth is that quality service is based on having the
| right incentives. And Google (and by extension, their
| employees and contractors) have _zero_ incentive to consider
| the needs and interests of their _product_.
|
| And why should they? If you're a car salesman, do you worry
| about how a particular car will feel if sold to a jerk? If
| you're a barista, do you care if the lattes you make are
| consumed or thrown away?
|
| I could go on, but I expect I've made my point.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Same, since about two month. The name of my country's brands,
| separated with dots or spaces. Extremely easy to detect, so why
| does it pass...
| tayo42 wrote:
| I wish recruiter emails counted as spam. Honestly don't why they
| don't. Some can't be bothered to include my name.
|
| No, No one wants to live in Arkansas doing contract to hire for
| $30/hour working on some windows mess.
|
| This is just junk mail
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Yep same issue here.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Best thing you can do is just hit the spam report button and
| wait. Spammers do occassionally get their hands on clean IPs or
| networks, and someone has to get the messages in their inbox for
| the crowdsourcing to work.
| Wingy wrote:
| Yes
| scrozier wrote:
| I'm not using gmail, but am seeing the exact same thing in the
| last 3-4 weeks with my email provider (Hover). Mine are all loan-
| related. Marking as spam has no effect.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Yes. Tons of home loan and home warranty spams.
| tandav wrote:
| Yep, last 2 weeks about 10-15 emails per day
| alister wrote:
| I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I want to
| suggest a possible solution. I've been getting almost no spam for
| the last 10+ years even though I don't use any spam filtering
| (neither in my email client nor with my email service provider).
| What I did was to switch from Gmail to a paid email provider
| (which costs less per year than going out for dinner on a Friday
| night). Then I started giving every single business a unique
| email alias. However, my friends all get the same email alias.
| Currently I have 370 active aliases. I've had to disable only 20
| aliases in the whole decade which works out to only about 5% of
| my contacts. I always try the unsubscribe button if a business
| spams me before disabling an alias and that often works.
|
| As I said, I use no spam filtering whatsoever, so I find it
| amazing that Gmail users _with_ spam filtering have such a
| different experience. There must be an explanation about why my
| method works: either Gmail addresses are a much greater target
| for spam, or using unique email addresses somehow keeps you off
| spam lists (but I can 't explain why it would).
| merwanedr wrote:
| Yes! I don't know if it's related but some emails I've recently
| sent went to spam in other people's inboxes.
| asciimov wrote:
| Not only am I having more spam in my inbox, in the past month I
| have had a significant increase in spam.
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