Comment by lunatuna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lunatuna | Hacker News Reader

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I have two accounts with google, one is personal and the other is through work.

My personal account is pretty clean and rarely does anything get through that shouldn't. Occasionally I find something in the spam filter that shouldn't be there, usually password resets.

My work account is seeing a big increase in "professional" spam. "Hey Guy, did you see my last email I sent . . .", "Hey Guy, we are the top network security consultants . . ." Many of them are getting tagged Important. Some of them are so left field it doesn't make any sense that they are listed as important. Here's a good one:

"You asked for it, and we made it. We are delighted to present a complete redesign of our Merge Rules in Duplicate Check." - coming from mta.exacttarget.com

How is that not spam and how did it get tagged important? I have no idea who this company is. I've never done business or corresponded with them.

As I write this I'm coming to the realization that I'm a mechanical turk working for Google to find and report.

What's interesting is that many of the emails are coming from clear email marketing sources like HubSpot and Exact Target. Why would those get bumped up? I also notice some coming from something like xxxx.outbound.protection.outlook.com - not sure what that is exactly, but it mostly comes from companies directly marketing using their spf and dkim domain, but seems to passing through outlook.com.

Email is dying but will never be dead.

> clear email marketing sources like HubSpot and Exact Target. Why would those get bumped up?

Those servers send a very high volume of legitimate marketing email that is not spam. Those services do a lot of policing within their platform to prevent or discourage use of their servers for actual spam. So when someone does manage to get spam out through that service, it often gets past more filters downstream. Theoretically, Hubspot or Exact Target will get notifications and shut down those senders so Google trusts them, gives them some leeway and doesn't ban the servers outright.

I'm not sure if it should be trusted or not. It is fully unsolicited and I have zero relationship with them and never gave my info explicitly. Seems pretty spammy.

But what is much more interesting is Gmail is pushing the spam up by tagging it as important and it ends up at the top of my email list and not in the lower section of everything else. It should be in the spam folder with all the other junk, but out ranks internal JIRA tickets, daily sales report etc.

Could there be an implicit or explicit incentive? Am I the spam detection?

I’ve also been getting subtle professional spam consisting of very short emails, something like:

from: kate.random.but.reasonable.name38 @ gmail . com

Sorry for the delay, here is my email.

Best, Kate

Sometimes they are more obviously spam, but other times it seems nearly impossible for a spam filter to stop, like the example I provided.

I've gotten those, assume they are to try and train gmail to think they aren't spammers for future spam messages.

That is a good theory.

I was always assuming that if I reply, then they would send the spam links, but your theory is better.

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