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Comment by Pikamander2

1 day ago

Gmail's spam detection has some real headscratcher moments every now and then.

Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam even if you've been receiving emails from them for years.

And then right afterwards it'll allow an obvious scam email with a PDF attachment from some random Gmail account that you've never contacted to go straight to your inbox.

Several years back when I applied for a Google internship, I missed some emails from my recruiter (soandso@google.com) because they went to my gmail spam folder.

  • There is a good reason for this. Part of Google maintains the principle that their own traffic has to go through the same classification process as all other mails. Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs. Consequently, some of Google's own behaviors have poor reputation and some legitimate transactional messages are collateral damage.

    • > Other parts of Google can't stop themselves from sending spam from what are supposed to be gold-plated VIPs.

      Seems like a badly run company.

      (Insert that caricature of the MSFT org chart with guns pointing in all directions.)

      3 replies →

It's gotten to the point that I don't open emails from Sendgrid support because 4 out of 5 are poorly disguised phishing attempts.

> Some days it'll mark legitimate transaction emails from major companies as spam

I get legitimate transactional emails intended for someone else and those senders refuse to stop them because I'm not their customer and only their customer can request account updates. Those get marked as spam.