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Comment by rep_movsd | Hacker News Reader

I have had legit emails end up in the spam folder since 2011 or so

gmail coders are dumb

me too! I would not have got my current job if I didn't randomly check my spam folder. Tbf it was a cold email from a recruiter

Or maybe it's a hard problem?

Gmail sometimes lets through particularly obvious spam, of the kind that heuristics could definitely catch.

It's almost certainly a lack of will, or an insistence on filtering in a particular way. (Eg. considering themselves above heuristics, insisting a fancy AI must catch it)

To give you an example, one piece of spam that hit my Gmail inbox recently came from an address like: 6UGH578FDJ3@abusejan.beauty

On that email, Gmail shows a warning that the sender's domain didn't encrypt the message. The email is in a mixture of German & English. Most of the email is one big image. The unsubscribe link text is: "To be removed from our mailing list please?Click Here? Unsub-HERE"

> Gmail sometimes lets through particularly obvious spam, of the kind that heuristics could definitely catch.

I administer email for the company I work for. You might be surprised how often perfectly legitimate email looks a hell of a lot like spam.

  - individuals who can't spell and write stream of consciousness near-nonsense
  - companies forging the from: header with the target's own address
  - companies sending mass mail with red flag keywords from rando cloud instances
  - small companies using personal gmail accounts and including any kind of money-related term

...to name a few. Spam is a hard problem and marketers and scammers (same diff) are working hard every day to defeat any system you put in place to stop their bullshit.

I once ignored an email that was pretty obviously spam. It claimed to be from my bank, but had email links to another domain and not my bank, and a header looked like it was scanned from a piece of paper, badly, and was the only logo on the page.

Turned out to be completely legit. They really were trying to contact me to tell me they didn't get my proof of insurance.

When I told them my concerns, they didn't understand.

The thing is, as a user, I'm going to be very understanding if something that looks a lot like spam coming from an unrecognized address ends up in spam.

Most users are. Some very much are not. Guess which ones tend toward the top of the org chart?

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