Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?
15 hours ago
Almost all transactional emails are being marked as suspicious even when their SPF/DKIM records are fine and they’ve been whitelisted before. Did Google break something in gmail/spam filtering?
See also https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...
(from other threads that we merged hither)
Briefly, this morning, I had the opposite effect happen to my Gmail inbox in which things that would normally land in the social and updates folders ended up in my primary folder. I don't know which I'd be more freaked out by: a broken Gmail spam filter or 18 inches of snow.
Concur, I've had Promotions land in my Primary inbox for at least a few hours.
This. Same, got a lot of spam getting to my inbox this morning.
Yes, me as well. Thought I had mistakenly changed something but I hadn't. Have also noticed that ad blockers stopped working last week; now as well as the wrong routing in Gmail, that casting to Chromecast from Chrome stopped working today.
Good job Google!
It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).
Seriously. I didn't even realize this was a wide issue, but I couldn't find a school enrolment email I was looking for this morning, and found it in the spam folder. The fact that I basically never have to do this is actually amazing.
I wonder about difference in experience that different people have with gmail’s spam filter. In my case, the majority of emails that go to my gmail spam folder are legitimate. I don’t actually receive much spam, a single-digit number of emails per month (in the past 30 days, 2 emails), so any time I see anything in my spam folder I have to check so that I can rescue the email if legitimate.
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They probably have a trillion emails with human labels, either from users directly applying them, or inferrable from actions like deleting.
With that much data, even a simple Bayesian classifier should work pretty much perfectly.
Yeah i have fantasies of having my own email server and stuff but the spam detection is probably the 3rd thing that would have me crawling back
I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.
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As someone who's run my own email for 25 years or so (I'm really getting old...) my biggest problem is not that I receive spam (spamassassin mostly takes care of it) but that my sent emails get marked as spam by big email providers. Yahoo is the worst offender and seems to do so at some base despite my best efforts (spf, dkim, arc, and jumping through their registration hoops)
I'm running my own mail server for longer than I'd like to admit, but not for my critical/key email addresses. Looking at the spam filtering I get in Gmail and knowing my endless fights with spamassassin and DSBLs I know I could never achieve that.
The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.
Not just you, widespread reports on /r/gmail and Twitter since ~12 hours ago. Likely a bad model push on Google's end. Workaround: check spam folder for legit mail, mark as "not spam" + star important senders to retrain your filter faster. Usually resolves in 24-48h when they rollback.
Google's spam filter is having a moment. Even emails with perfect auth records are getting flagged - clearly a broken model deployment. Mark legitimate emails as "not spam" aggressively. They'll either rollback or your local filter will adapt. This happens every 6-12 months with Gmail.
Yes, my Gmail inbox is full of regular senders being flagged as "possibly unsafe" and I need to click a button "Looks Safe" to accept them. They are not being spamboxed, but they are definitely flagged. Even official communications from the USPS!
The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being.
They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".
They are not being marked as "Suspicious" but they are showing an infobox that explains they could not be scanned at all.
You could click "Seems Safe" on these messages, but they are not scanned by Google, and they are simply adding a disclaimer that they currently can't vouch for the safety of a message that they couldn't scan. It seems to me that this is a prudent and helpful course of action.
The promotions/updates/forums/etc classification is also down.
This has been “down” for me for a few months now, ever since Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training. So now you can’t filter this stuff without also agreeing to a whole swath of unrelated and opt-ins.
Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.
Same. Can’t ignore the messages when they’re all in one place, which makes hitting unsubscribe easier.
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> Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training
This never happened. It was a lie spread on Twitter. And now you are spreading it.
Noticed it immediately. I get a lot more spam messages per day than I thought that I did.
Same here. Until recently I would get maybe 1-2 spams a month, and I just got 30 in the span of a few days.
They’re the very obvious, very obnoxious kind of spam, and Gmail still correctly sends them to the junk bin, so I wonder if they were shadowbanned before and Google simply decided to make the process more explicit (which I don’t hate on principle).
Either that or my address was scrapped from somewhere by a spam bot and the timing is coincidental.
Everybody gets way more spam than they realize because Google doesn't deliver it to the spam label. 99% of it is rejected at SMTP time.
Google just let through an email spoofed from my own domain (via a mailgun server). It was a phishing attack about the domain being shut down. The connection between the domain name and my personal email address have never been published. Either google or Squarespace leaked the info.
Ah, this is why I've been receiving a bunch of very obvious spam/scam mails in my inbox.
I got a classic and obvious 419 scam email today. Kind of felt like I'd gone back to a simpler time.
Yeah my inbox looked like 2005 again—nothing but raw, unfiltered chaos.
My wife was complaining this morning that her "promotions" were not getting sorted correctly. She will be happy to know it is an actual issue.
Thank goodness. My Gmail address is my first name so I typically get many hundreds of spam’s a day which are almost all caught. Dozens in my inbox today so I figured something was up. Glad it’s not that the spam pedlars have suddenly gotten clever.
> My Gmail address is my first name
It's good to be you! My wife and I both have 3-letter first names so we never had that option, despite getting in on the Gmail beta 20+ years ago.
I have the opposite problem. I'm receiving 30 spams every day with links to Google's own domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
they (gmail/google) must have added AI to the email server.
I see nothing amiss on my oldest Gmail account. But then, I get probably <1 spam email a day on average, and even less legitimate mail, and even less that isn't an automatic notification of something or other that's already filtered and categorized by sender.
Today gmail labelled an email coming from google search console as potentially dangerous, however it was because it couldn't properly do spam filtering on the email.
I seem to be experiencing the opposite! Lots of spam flowing through.
I've had Stack Overflow's last newsletter of 2025 land in spam, which was strange because surely they didn't lose relevance that much yet, did they?
I feel like things have been going on a little bit longer than this indicates.
I have been receiving a large number of spam emails in my "Important and Unread" areas which is anomalous. I was wondering exactly why and this helps. thanks!
Probably graiduation day
The only thing in my gmail spam box is some ad for a pirate tv streaming service that's probably a scam...
Ahh. Wok up to a follow up email an address already marked as spam so couldn't figure out what was going on.
Is this why I keep getting ads in my Primary inbox?
Absolutely
Actually having the opposite problem, I'm getting 50+ emails that SHOULD be marked as spam.
Interesting, I’ve had a lot of emails lately flagged as “Promotions” even when they were not.
Any ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?
Step zero. Never disclose your email address to anyone.
This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails.
Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?
I did a “reset” a few years ago where I moved to a fresh gmail address, forwarded my old one, and updated all my accounts to use Apple’s Hide My Email service, unique per sender.
After a few years of updating addresses that I’d missed whenever something showed up that was forwarded from my old gmail account, I shut down my old account.
No more spam, whenever I start receiving spam to a Hide My Email address, I deactivate it.
I recently had a "role" Google account terminated because I was (paraphrasing) "violating Google policies" by having multiple accounts. I didn't know they were sticklers about that.
(I don't much care because the account was just used for interacting with somebody else's Google-hosted junk but, if I had been using it for something serious, I have probably been frustrated.)
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I feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.
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I receive at least a dozen spam emails every day, sometimes as many as 60.
Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox.
Why should I care who has my email address?
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I might be missing something, but if you’ve never given them out to anyone at all, then what’s the point?
I have an absurd and overwrought system involving Gmail, and client-side rspamd and SpamSieve on my Mac. Gmail is (was?) overly aggressive flagging things as spam, so I have the client-side Bayesian filter check Gmail’s spam folder and rescue good email, so long as rspamd also says it’s not phishing. And then add sender to a Gmail whitelisting rule. All rescued email is flagged such that if I later manually move any of it back to junk, it stays there as spam and updates the corpus.
I now never get good email in the spam folder, and never get undetected spam in the inbox, and very occasionally get a spam erroneously rescued, but still visually flagged as iffy-but-maybe-ham.
If Gmail has been lax at filtering spam lately, I haven’t noticed, but perhaps the Bayesian filter has been picking up the slack.
I should consider this - I run my own domains, and for years I just forwarded it to gmail, but I had so many cases when mails were put into spam, even replies to emails I had sent in the middle of a long conversation between myself and 1 other person, that I went to just self-hosted IMAP. Then for years I couldn't reliably send to google or yahoo or MS; I added SPF a while ago which help, but recently buckled down and put in SRS and DMARC and DKIM (and rspamd while I was at it); now I get the mail I want, and can mostly send mail without it being rejected (still have to ask people to check spam, but anyways many people I have to tell them I'm emailing them anyways if its important). However I have a lot of non-spam "promotion" emails that I don't want to see. If I could train gmail to not block legit stuff reliably, that would be worth trying again (I would say except for the privacy implications, but since so much email involves gmail on one side or the other, they probably get most of it anyways).
Multiple accounts as others have said. The most powerful is to switch to a provider that permits custom domains and allows you to construct topic specific wildcard addresses on the fly. These can't be flagged as invalid or stripped like Google '+' suffixes and when compromised, you can filter them into oblivion and move on to something else. You also get the bonus of having the entire namespace to yourself and can select short addresses.
Which service provider would you recommend?
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I use Gmail since the beta (I got invite from a googler) and I don't remember when they began adding spam control but in my experience the GMail spam check works usually exceptionally well: I very rarely need to add a custom filter.
My email, over two decades+ (2004?), hasn't been in a many public leaks (only one on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ) but obviously has made its way to various spammy actors but thankfully nearly everything is caught by GMail's spam filter.
If anything I'd say GMail's spam filter works too well: I get more legit emails in my spam folder than spam in my regular inbox. As in: one in a rare while vs about zero spam in my regular inbox.
I'm having the exact opposite issue. 30+ emails today that clearly belong in spam (fake package delivery, "failed payment for your cloud subscription", etc) have landed in my inbox.
So thankful for this development. This was the final nudge I needed to finally ditch Gmail, after 20something years.
Maybe Gmail knows something?
The weights in their filters are crowd-sourced, so the best thing you can do is mark them as not suspicious (if you are certain, of course).
FWIW, I am not seeing this. My Spam label contains just spam.
Finally, it would be good to know what you are observing. Are you seeing this as recipient or sender?
As a recipient.
- Emails are being aggressively marked as “suspicious” out of the blue (USPS, HR emails, system emails, promotional emails)
- Those emails are being regularly delayed by 7-10 minutes.
- Priority inbox rules seem reset
- “Never mark as spam” rules are seemingly not respected
Additional reports on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GMail/comments/1qln9zp/gmail_not_fi...
There's your confirmation, then. It must be either a localized failure to some subgroup of users, or triggered by some combination of settings, if some people are seeing it and others are not.
Added: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...
Yep, getting this too.
It's been happening for about a month for me. I had to start monitoring spam because legit emails end up there. Funnily enough I started having the opposite problem too - plenty of obvious spam and phishing attempt ending up in my mailbox.
I had to make a bunch of filters on my side.
One more reason to migrate to Proton
I have seen a spam button show up I haven't seen in a long time.
It might be a new round of AI training featuring the labour of customers as free employees doing training. Every time we click, we consent to sharing private email data.
Good on Google for having clear and timely outage notifications even for a minor to moderate subservice like spam detection.
Wow you can’t even give praise on HN without getting downvoted
Two related issues not mentioned yet:
Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords.
Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...
Now, what about the Messages app? Starting last December I started receiving 10 spam SMS messages a day. Previously it was maybe one per week.
Control your phone number better.
Only answer numbers you recognize, everyone else gets voicemail.
Cell phone spam is a 10 year+ old memory for me.
[flagged]
We get it, you hate AI. Here, your gold star.
Is there some history behind the spam detector being those things or is this a vibe comment?
I don't understand why spam detection is so complicated. I can tell with high accuracy if an email is spam just by the subject line. I'd think even basic ML could do this very reliably you don't need a bleeding-edge LLM to do this.
Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.
ORLY?
* Are you available? * Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday? * Assistance for donation * Greetings!!! * some ideas for you * Refund request * Somethings not working * Manuel Montoya for roof work contractor * proposals for print * Invite Connection
Half of the above are actual spam, half are not. Tell me which is which ...
I agree with you but for the love of the game, these are the ones I'm guessing are spam:
* Paul, can we have a zoom meeting with you on Monday?
* Assistance for donation
* Greetings!!!
* Invite Connection
* Refund request
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If there's any question look at the sender. I delete half my email unread based on subject and sender alone.
They can tweak the subject to something not obviously spammy.
Obviousness in spam is a feature, they don't have to waste effort on people who know better.
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You can tell from your subject lines.
You cannot 100% tell from others’ subject lines,
if you don’t know them personally.
Yes but I also don't have the ability to know what millions of accounts are receiving, unlike Google.
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