Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

"Good thing they are detected as SPAM"

and

"Seems that Google is losing the battle against spammers."

These seem like contradictory statements to me. I think what you're saying is that these emails end up in the SPAM folder? Doesn't that mean the spam/phishing filters are working? Or am I reading that wrong?

Google's spam filters are one of the BIG reasons I stick with Google for my email. For my stuff, they work REALLY well. Very few false positives, and very few spam/phishing messages get through. Though looking at my spam folder looks very different than yours.

View on HN

Just putting all spam in the spam box isn't good enough unless you also never put legitimate mail in there, or you hardly get any spam. Otherwise, you have to sift through tons of spam to dig out the legitimate emails, which is almost as much work as just deleting all the spam yourself.

Google just deletes most spam (or refuses to accept it in the first place).

I just checked my spam folder. It had 89 messages in it. (Anything older than 30 days is deleted automatically.) Most were definitely spam. Some were political campaigns that I didn't unsubscribe from. A bunch were from the Red Cross, which for some reason doesn't go away even though I've unsubscribed (and which tells me that I've unsubscribed when I push the "unsubscribe" link).

There were 2 that I marked not-spam: a receipt I don't care about, and a mailing list that I don't care about (and will unsubscribe from).

The vast majority of spam never made it to my inbox. I know it exists: that 30-day supply used to be in the tens-of-thousands.

I'd be surprised if there were legitimate emails being deleted. Perhaps there would be if I had a different use case (e.g. if I wanted unsolicited job offers), but as it stands it seems entirely manageable.

I've certainly have many legitimate emails marked as SPAM by Gmail, that's why I have to check my SPAM folder from time to time, and why I am frustrated to receive to many SPAM email even though they are marked as SPAM.

These email are marked as SPAM but Gmail is still failing to detect them as phishing.

Providers also often hard-block emails when they are certain to be SPAM. Some people don't know it, but many SPAM emails sent to you are not even shown to you, not even in the SPAM folder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com