Hacker News Reader

Comment by c5karl | Hacker News Reader

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again.

I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual level. Either that or the button is simply a placebo.

Fortunately, the false positives for personal correspondence from individuals are still extremely rare, at least for me.

View on HN

Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.

based on the collective judgment of Gmail users

I find this trend of "follow the majority" quite disturbing - it's as if they're implicitly saying that everyone should think the same way and punishing those who don't follow. What's spam to me may not be spam to you, and vice-versa.

Then again, having a personalised spam filter for each user would probably consume a huge amount of resources...

Not sure why you are down-voted. Perhaps because everyone (that run their own mail) generally runs individual filtering per account. Typically spam assassin will score an email, but filtering (based on that, and other criteria) is up to the individual user (eg: by having a white-list, choosing spam score to treat as spam etc).

As mentioned further up, some scoring works well for many users, but not for all, such as marking eg: Russian/Chinese/Not-spoken-here-by-most language as spam.

I really see no reason for why Google should be so bad at classifying email as they apparently are.

That idea sounds compelling at first, but the data doesn't support it. There are plenty of email marketers who are focused on a non-technical audience (who presumably use 'mark as spam' to unsubscribe frequently) and which have no problems with spam folder placement.

There's a spectrum, and if a given sender looks considerably worse than average, they're more likely to get filtered.

If anything, if a newsletter is getting filtered, it's more likely to be the marketing manager's fault - perhaps they don't adequately monitor deliverability, or they don't test their content, or they don't use activity segmentation... etc.

You can set up a filter to never mark the matching items a spam.

That's what I do for the Lua Mailing list.

Sure, but I shouldn't have to do that. (That's a criticism of Google, not your good advice.)

Come to think of it, if they're going to have a "Never send it to Spam" flag in filter config, shouldn't it default to TRUE? If you're taking the trouble to set up a filter, it's probably because you are interested in those messages.

Some mailing lists get spammed.

Wait, where is the "Never send it to Spam" option? I cannot find this option.

I'm on mobile, so I can't send you a screenshot, but it should be un the list where you add tags, skip the inbox and so on, acter creating à filtre.

Dragging the message to your 'primary' inbox sends a stronger signal than 'not spam'. Maybe worth a try.

How easy is it to unsubscribe from those newsletters? Is there a one-click unsubscribe link that doesn't require you to login or enter anything before unsubscribing you?

If I've subscribed to a mailing list or newsletter and there isn't a one-click unsubscribe I'll click the Spam button to get it out of my inbox instead of going through their procedure.

One-Click Unsubscribe is paramount for mailing lists and newsletters not getting marked as Spam.

If your newsletter has a good reputation then clicking "mark as spam" in Gmail prompts the user to automatically unsubscribe instead of marking spam, or to do both. If your newsletter has marginal or bad reputation or does not offer automatic unsubscription then that doesn't appear.

Sometimes I don't want to deal with the people any more.

This may be an anxiety issue on my part. Fair enough. I will generally continue to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com