
Dear Google Mail Team - ingve
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA
======
dasil003
I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false
positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200
times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

~~~
austenallred
I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and
literally not one I would want in my inbox.

It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from
a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of
email from private servers.

Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email
users.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Just FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.

~~~
nchelluri
What happens to it? It gets blackholed somehow?

~~~
leonatan
Mail relay servers deny its acceptance.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Google can also decide it's not even worth showing in the spam folder - the
spam folder is for things it's less certain of.

------
billconan
very funny, right after I saw this, I decided to check my spam folder just to
see if anything important has been filtered out, and I saw an email sent by
google marked as a spam:

this email is sent by google when logging in google account from a new
machine. they tag their own email as spam ...

Hi xxx, Your Google Account xxx@gmail.com was just used to sign in from Chrome
on Windows.

Don't recognize this activity? Review your recently used devices now.

Why are we sending this? We take security very seriously and we want to keep
you in the loop on important actions in your account. We were unable to
determine whether you have used this browser or device with your account
before. This can happen when you sign in for the first time on a new computer,
phone or browser, when you use your browser's incognito or private browsing
mode or clear your cookies, or when somebody else is accessing your account.
Best,

The Google Accounts team

~~~
notahacker
At least their filters are as impartial as they're inaccurate and overly
aggressive...

~~~
Zancarius
I wonder how that'd work in an anti-trust case?

"Your honor, clearly you can see that our services are so impartial as to
_flag our own email_..."

Something tells me that probably wouldn't work.

~~~
afarrell
If yahoo sued them? I don't see why it wouldn't. It may not convince an expert
witness, but why wouldn't it convince a jury?

~~~
Zancarius
Yeah, good point. I guess I was feeling unnecessarily cynical.

If _I_ were on the jury, I'd definitely buy it. Their counsel would have to
really bone up the argument that it was such equal treatment, they were
flagging their own messages. And the prosecution would have to really stretch
things, probably entering into conspiratorial territory in order to make a
case.

Then again, I've found myself perplexed by jury decisions on tech-related
cases more than once. Although having sat on a jury, I can see how such
decisions might be made.

------
secabeen
I run my own mail server with full SPF, DKIM and SRS, routing the mail through
a relay at a reputable VPS provider on high-reputation IPs. Over the last few
months, there seems to be this pattern where if I email someone @gmail who
I've never mailed before, they don't seem to ever get it. I wonder if this is
the issue.

~~~
noir_lord
This is one of the reasons I use Google Apps for Business for email (that and
I find running mail servers tedious) as deliverability is consistently
simpler.

~~~
svl
Having to use a Google product instead of your own mail server, in order to
have your email delivered to Google customers, sounds like anti-competitive
business practices to me. You'd think they'd be a wee bit more careful with
something like that given EU interest in them...

~~~
theflyingkiwi42
It also isn't enough. Some of our gmail users' email (sent through the gmail
smtp server with oauth) will be marked as spam in gmail. Very frustrating!

------
chbrown
I'm kind of surprised that Linus uses Gmail.

It's likely that he'll actually catch a Googler's attention, but for many of
us, user feedback is not an option.

@jacquesm's [http://jacquesmattheij.com/ham-or-spam-gmail-not-to-be-
trust...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/ham-or-spam-gmail-not-to-be-trusted-for-
important-mail) is another recent instance — but again, there's no call to
action.

Gmail is great for some people, but I prefer having more control, and I highly
recommend [https://FastMail.com](https://FastMail.com) if Gmail is failing to
meet your needs.

~~~
RyJones
Linux Foundation uses Google Apps for Work.

Source: I am an LF employee.

~~~
sebastianavina
does the linux foundation have offices?

~~~
RyJones
100% virtual. We have labs and a couple of the projects we support have
offices, but no office like you're thinking.

~~~
sebastianavina
why?

how do you got a work there?

~~~
RyJones
why what? why no offices? keeps overhead lower, we like working from home, who
is going to tell Linus to show up at an office every day?

------
c5karl
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.

~~~
gerbal
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.

~~~
userbinator
_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...

~~~
e12e
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.

------
LukaAl
Happened to me as well. Some of the eMail were just "updates" email that I
like to receive but if they get lost is not a big deal. But a couple of them
were very important one, and to make things worst, they were answer to email
in which I was in CC. So, a colleague of mine send an email to someone and CC
me. The second person answer and that mail is marked spam for me but not for
the person who wrote the original eMail. Doesn't make sense that an answer to
a legitimate conversation is by default a legitimate eMail?

~~~
e12e
Thankfully there's Hangouts, so we can all move off email... /s

------
cybojanek
How much of this is caused by people marking mailing list emails as SPAM
instead of properly unsubscribing?

~~~
therealarmen
I don't blame them when the Unsubscribe link is buried at the bottom of a 8MB
marketing newsletter in 4px font.

~~~
pd1
Or when you need to log in again to unsubscribe

~~~
eCa
Which is illegal in the US[1] (and I believe EU, as well), and hence deserves
to be reported as spam.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496688)

~~~
TylerE
A big problem I've had is that many of these are "business
relationship/transactional" e-mails, which play by different rules.

My address is my first name + last initial (neither of which are all that
uncommon), and this is made much worse by Gmails idiotic ignoring of periods
in addresses. There is a dude in Denver, CO who is absolutely convinced his
e-mail address is tyler.e@gmail.com. It isn't. I'm really sick of getting his
AT&T and car insurance e-mails.

~~~
tizzdogg
This happens to me all the time as well. I also have
firstname.lastname@gmail.com and apparently a lot of other people seem to
think they do as well. Or at least, they have firstname.lastname1@gmail.com
and people easily forget to add the number.

I wish there was a better way to deal with this type of situation other than
constantly sending "please fix your address book" emails. Email is a broken
system.

~~~
e12e
I'm not sure how you go from: Unless you have Google Apps for Business (or
whatever), there are no vanity domains for gmail; to: email is a broken
system?

Gmail.com is certainly broken in the sense that they want to cram 10 billion
users into a single domain. It's ridiculous marketing/brand-motivated UX
failure.

Since forever most mail services had a few vanity-domains, so people could get
first.last@wherever.com. But no, Google doesn't want to provide email, they
want to provide "Google Mail".

Apologies for the rant, but I can't stand it when big companies create
problems through stupidity.

~~~
tizzdogg
I dont believe I said anything about vanity domains, so I dont know what you
mean by that.

I meant that email is broken in the sense that when some stranger mistakenly
thinks that your email belongs to them, and continues to give it out or sign
it up for mailing lists, you have absolutely no recourse. If you have an email
address that like mine is easily mistaken for other ones you get incorrectly-
addressed personal emails many times a day. There is no way to find the actual
intended recipient or get in contact with that person to say "hey you seem to
be confusd, stop using my email address". And there is no really good way to
filter those emails, since after all they are coming to your correct address.
I think this is the kind of problem that's difficult to appreciate unless it
happens to you frequently.

The problem with email is that anyone can email you if they have your
address.. thats why we have so much spam. I dont know what the solution is,
but it would be much better if the recipient had to opt-in to the conversation
somehow as well.

~~~
dingaling
> so I dont know what you mean by that.

I believe he means that if tizz.dogg@gmail.com was already taken, Google
should offer tizz.dogg@loopyloop.com rather than tizz.dogg1@gmail.com. In fact
they shouldn't even show that as an option.

Since Google Is now a domain registrar they could create the new domains on
the fly.

Then there wouldn't be namespace collisions.

~~~
e12e
Indeed. Google/Gmail do two strange things: a) While they support the age old
username+whatever@gmail.com in order for users to hand out special addresses
to mailinglists etc (eg: user+facebook@gmail.com, user+lkml@facebook.com) --
they _don 't_ distinguish on dots in the username (so username == user.name ==
u.ser.name etc). And b) they don't offer other domains than gmail.com, which
leads to strange things like smith1, smith79 etc.

As for there being "no recourse" \-- apart from spam, that's just wrong. It's
_much_ faster to reply with a "This is not _your_ Smith"-mail, than it is to
write a "return to sender" on an envelope. Same thing for getting phone calls
from a different timezone etc.

[ed: I do agree that it's a bit more difficult with people that don't know
their _own_ address -- still think it should be quicker to reach their
contacts via email than via comparable means.]

~~~
tizzdogg
>> It's much faster to reply with a "This is not your Smith"-mail

Right, and I've sent literally hundreds of those emails. They almost never do
any good, because while one person may fix your address in their contacts
list, the original person who gave out the faulty address is still out there,
unaware that they're giving out bad info. I always ask if the email sender can
tell the intended recipient about this when they figure out the right address,
but that rarely works. Anyway, I know this is a very specific problem that
only affects a small fraction of people, but it's extremely annoying.

I dont really see how allowing other domains would help.. that just shifts the
issue to the domain string instead of the user string. I guess it gives people
more options. But one of the main benefits of gmail addresses is that it's so
common. Everybody knows it, so nobody ever misspells the 'gmail' part at
least.

------
incepted
After reading this, I went through my spam folder and it's looking overall
quite okay EXCEPT that all the comments on Google+ in response to things I
posted these past few weeks are marked as spam. All of them.

Yup: Gmail is marking comments originating from Google+ and written by
legitimate users as spam.

------
tortilla
Wow, just checked my spam folder and there was an important email marked as
spam by Gmail. It was from a known contact I had already corresponded with.

~~~
netheril96
Every spam filter has false positive. You should make a habit of checking Spam
folder periodically, whatever email services you employ (unless you do not
enable spam filtering).

------
tempestn
What would be really fantastic is if Google let you set your own spam
threshold. I can't even imagine it would be too difficult. Presumably they
determine a numeric 'spam likelihood' number for each incoming email already,
so this would just mean being able to customize the threshold that that number
is compared against. Obviously entering it numerically wouldn't be very user
friendly, but even 5 levels from most to least aggressive (like Spam Assassin
and such offer) would be extremely helpful.

Even better would be if you could have different handling for different
levels, like black-holing or auto-trashing the absolutely-definitely spam,
making it easier to occasionally scan the regular spam box. I get something
over 1000 spam emails per day, so it's just not feasible to give even a
cursory look over them to find the false positives. I can't even imagine what
it would be like for someone like Linus.

Unfortunately, that would draw attention to the fact that the spam filter
isn't perfect, and would require users to make choices with tradeoffs, so I
can't imagine it's a very attractive option for Google.

------
scrollaway
I am subscribed to the wine-devel, wine-bugs and wine-patches mailing lists
([https://www.winehq.org/forums](https://www.winehq.org/forums)). Having the
exact same issue.

It seems to very easily flag _discussion_ about .exes as spam, it's really
disappointing. It's been several years and the filters haven't improved,
despite me religiously flagging spam/not spam in those lists.

In the end I just gave up and set up filters to specifically prevent marking
incoming emails on those lists as spam. It misses the odd linkedin invitation,
but it's not like it was catching it before...

~~~
milspec
You are "flagging spam/not spam in those lists" but Google may then associate
that list (not the content) as being spam or not. Google sees that mail comes
from the list and decides based on that.

This is why I never mark mailing list email as spam, even if it is in fact
spam.

~~~
scrollaway
That's my point. Everything that went to spam, I flagged as "not spam".

~~~
milspec
Yes, but did you ever mark mailing list email as spam? (actual spam even)

If so, maybe gmail thinks "this sender is spammy". That's the mailing list.

~~~
scrollaway
I don't think I did; but if I did, I'd argue gmail should know better.

------
noinsight
He already got a response from the Gmail product manager, must be nice being
Linus.

Notice the comments from Sri Somanchi. He's listed as the product manager
here: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-
not-...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you-
dont.html)

------
mkhpalm
The unfortunate thing about gmail is its gotten worse than AOL was to deal
with on the spam front. I feel like there are historical lessons worth
learning regarding where all those @aol.com users went.

1\. Everything became "spam"

2\. They got to a point where they believed they were the standard

3\. Nobody could do anything about it

I can think of many places where this same situation has played out. Its yet
to work long term without disastrous results after a reign of technical
darkness. That doesn't seem to stop people from thinking it won't happen to
them.

Its fine to aggressively fight spam. If you choose to error on the side of
false positives then its in your own interest to provide reasonable recourse.
If not, you've left a very large gap that somebody else will come in and fill.
Just as google did.

------
elevensies
It might not be related, but I've been seeing some spam in my gmail inbox in
the past month. It seems that something has upset the balance. For example,
this went to my inbox:

 _From: [...] Baby <[...]baby@gmail.com>

Subject: HELLO HANDSOME

Body: HOW ARE YOU DOING_

~~~
alexdmiller
Interesting, I've been getting very similar spam messages slip into my gmail
inbox.

~~~
hauget
Likewise.

------
qmalxp
A few months ago, I wrote a simple Android app and put it on the Play Store.
Now every two weeks I receive unsolicited spammy emails about ad campaigns and
increasing user awareness. Funny how those get through the filter.

~~~
throwaway2048
sort of doubly ironic that many other Google service emails that you actually
want to receive get filtered...

------
blfr
They also started delaying or outright rejecting some mail more aggressively
so you don't even get to find it in spam. A few days ago I received a
confirmation code from my CA sent to hostmaster@ the next morning after I
requested it.

What's even worse they rejected email to postmaster@. I know you can adjust
the spam filter sensitivity somewhere in Google Apps but come on, you should
not reject any mail to postmaster by default.

------
lucb1e
The real shocker is that Linus Torvalds uses gmail, where you have no control
over anything regarding your account (exhibit A: look an awesome new spam
filter which you can't turn off!). I would never have thought he'd do that.

~~~
becausecomputer
No. Google Apps for Work.

~~~
lucb1e
Well same thing, isn't it? Clearly he is forced to use a spamfilter with no
opt-in or opt-out.

~~~
jbit
Google Apps has a few more knobs at least:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368132?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368132?hl=en)

------
balls187
"Check your spam folder" is now a default instruction for automated email
notifications.

Luckily it's pretty easy to scan the folder for valuable messages.

However, having to do that is clearly not ideal.

Had a wedding RSVP get flagged as spam.

------
jrapdx3
FWIW after reading this article, and comments here, I decided to check on the
gmail account of a small not-for-profit organization I belong to (I'm the
unofficial IT guy). I was shocked, there were 4127 spam messages, and just 98
unread items in the inbox. Slogging through the spam I did find some non-spam
mail, but altogether that was <1% of the 4127 spam items.

Of course gmail deletes spam more than 30 days old, so how does it happen than
an obscure educational non-profit gets over 4000 spam messages a month? Gmail
must be a huge spam magnet, but still a mystery how those messages find their
way into _this_ spam bucket. (Unless in the past somebody had abused the
account and the email address is on a thousand spammers lists...)

In any case hard to be certain what criteria the spam filter uses to declare a
piece to be "spam". Not all the misclassified emails were sent from "private"
servers, it would be useful if it was more clearly specified.

~~~
bliker
I’ve noticed the same thing. Do you by any chance have a catch-all address?
That was the major source of spam in the inbox for me.

------
barrkel
Mailing lists are a massive source of false positives for spam. I've pretty
much given up on trying to use gmail to subscribe to them.

~~~
click170
Subscribing to high volume mailing lists from gmail is something I would
actually advise against.

I had legitimate emails bouncing because the mailing list had put me over the
maximum number of emails that a free Google account can recieve in a day. I
didn't even know there was such a limit until I hit it.

I now run my own mail server and have none of these or the other problems
outlined here.

------
rn222
Google Mail Team, please test all future spam algorithm changes against Linus'
inbox.

------
rcarmo
I've been on the other end of this for a few days - basically any company I do
business with who has their e-mail on Google simply doesn't get my e-mails.
Sometimes I get an active bounce (i.e., a reject due to my originating
address), sometimes... Nothing. No pattern, either. Same destination,
different behaviors.

The mail simply does not reach my suppliers'/partners' inbox, and as a result
we're all losing time and patience with this

The really funny thing? Some of those people I work with are @google.com.

(And yeah, my corporate domain is clean, SPF'd up to the wazoo, etc.)

------
Jemaclus
I've been actively interviewing for the past few weeks, and I've noticed that
a very large number of emails from companies and recruiters (mostly
recruiters) have been marked as Spam or at least shunted off to a non-Inbox
folder. I don't have any specific custom filters in place, so this is 100%
Gmail's doing. I find that interesting and frustrating -- and none of these
companies/recruiters have ever seen this before! Seems like a relatively new
phenomenon, at least for these people.

I wonder what Google's internal metrics show...

~~~
junto
This is mainly due to the fact that so many recruiters have poor practices. I
have a rule that if I'm contacted by a recruiter (unsolicited) I politely ask
them to remove my details from their database. I label their email as
unsubscribed and archive the email in Gmail.

When I get a second email from a recruiter that previously has been marked as
unsubscribed then I click that 'mark as spam' button.

I've been doing this for eight years, since I'm quite happy with my work
situation and have actively tried to remove myself from their databases over
that time. However my CV still seems to be floating around, even though I've
also deleted it from every online job portal I was signed up to.

At some point most recruiters need to feel that pain, because they just don't
listen.

------
datashovel
I think even Google should fear the prospects of Linus Torvalds on a mission
to "fix email".

------
multinglets
I'm guilty of this too, but it would really be great if we as a society could
develop some impulse against putting all of our eggs in the first shiny basket
we see.

------
rectangletangle
Been having similar issues as of late. A few very important emails got
classified as spam; not nearly 20%, but still enough to compromise my
confidence in the system.

------
hunter2_
Linus's 20% is not a false positive rate -- how has nobody caught this? Let's
assume that "the 0.1% false positive rate [Google] tried to make such a big
deal about last week" _is_ actually a false positive rate by the normal
definition.

The false positive rate is defined as (the number of false positives over
(false positives + true negatives)). However, Linus quite obviously calculated
the 20% as (false positives over positives), i.e. (200 / 1000). If Linus
happened to have 200,000 true negatives (i.e., non-spam messages that were not
flagged as spam), a number that I'm making up because he did not disclose one,
then his false positive rate would be (200 / 200,200) ~= 0.1%.

Think about it... whether his email address was harvested by all the spambots
in the world or none at all would have no effect on the fact that out of
200,200 legit messages, 200 were incorrectly flagged. This is why the false
positive formula doesn't even include true positives! The 800 true positives
(actual spam messages) don't matter to the formula. Therefore, neither does
the 1000 total (true+false) positives. Don't divide by it.

------
joezydeco
I've been fighting this for months. I run a simple mail forwarder for our
local school PTA (so that president@pta gets to whomever is the current
president, etc).

I've enabled every possible thing to make it work (DKIM, SPF, who the hell
knows) and mails forwarded to my members with gmail (or Google domain hosted)
accounts are always getting the forwarded email in their spam folders.

------
OscarCunningham
I had to disable spam detection entirely on gmail because I was losing
important emails every week. So now I just delete spam by hand.

------
berberous
I had a similar issue at some point, where for a month or two, quite obvious
"not spam" emails were getting caught in the filter. Nobody else on the
internet seemed to be having the issue, and then it suddenly one day stopped
happening again. I rarely mark emails as spam/not spam, so I don't think it
was anything I did.

------
noer
I looked at my own spam folder, there were 51 messages. ~15 of them were from
recruiters and probably meant for me, ~20 of them were newsletters I had
probably signed up for, but didn't miss at all and the rest were split evenly
for people trying to sell me prescriptions and people trying to use my bank
account to hold money. Overall, 50% of the messages were actually FOR me, but
it's totally fine that I didn't see them. I'm definitely wondering how many of
Linus' messages were actually important enough to not belong in spam. I
understand that he probably receives a lot more mail than I do, but I'm
wondering how many of those messages he actually missed. Other than the ones
that are part of threads he's replied to.

------
easyd
Google recently posted "The mail you want, not the spam you don’t":

[http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-
not-s...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2015/07/the-mail-you-want-not-spam-you-
dont.html)

~~~
yeukhon
> We also recognize that not all inboxes are alike. So while your neighbor may
> love weekly email newsletters, you may loathe them. With advances in machine
> learning, the spam filter can now reflect these individual preferences.

I really wonder how these preferences are reflected if someone hasn't been
using spam filters much. I get maybe at most a dozen spam emails escaped a
year, and the rest of the emails go through (all mailing lists... I am on a
lot of mailing lists) so I get about 50+ emails per day from just DL. So I
barely ever need to mark something as spam, or even more something to another
folder, so how does Google know what's my preference? It sounds like people
who don't actively mark spams are less likely affected...

------
BinaryIdiot
The false positives with GMail really sucks. Case in point literally all
Microsoft emails relating to billing on some of my products simply go the spam
(my credit card recently updated and I forgot to update it everywhere). So
thanks to this post I noticed and can go fix it!

------
someguy1233
Checked all my spam boxes on my various gmail accounts, seems nothing bad has
happened with mine.

At least they're nowhere near as bad as Outlook. I have one of my domains on
their free Live Domains (grandfathered plan, can't get it for free anymore,
similar to google apps) - and 90% of my emails end up in spam, even if they're
from a reputable company with sane mail setups such as Digital Ocean, Github
or even Google.

To make it worse, with Outlook you can't turn off the spam filter, and it's
known that Microsoft sometimes SILENTLY drops emails for various reasons so
they never even make it to your spam box...

Sadly I've yet to find any decent replacement mail service for my domains
that's free (or very cheap) and of decent quality.

------
paulpauper
How to get a job at Google: add annoying stuff no one asked for, ignore
requests users want

~~~
CamperBob2
"Sorry, Maps isn't hiring, but there's an opening in Mail."

------
davidw
Something like this happened to me recently:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/03/12/alarming-number-of-
spa...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/03/12/alarming-number-of-spam-false-
positives-in-gmail/)

A Googler on HN was kind enough to get in touch with me and help bring the
problem to the attention of the right people at Google, who fixed things on
their end and made a few suggestions on my end. Presumably, Linus Torvalds
will get about 1000x as much Google love as I did.

Good idea to check often though: I just discovered a few LiberWriter customers
in my own spam filter... :-/

------
snissn
All of the emails my mom sends me are tagged as spam. I have a label that
forces them to go to my inbox, but I still get a warning that gmail identified
her emails as spam, and there's no clear way of over-riding it.

------
guelo
I fear SMTP is going to go the way of RSS at the hands of these giant corps.
Closed protocols within machine gun lined walled gardens are the future. Sorry
old idealistic computer hipies, we've failed you.

~~~
troymc
What does this have to do with SMTP?

~~~
larssorenson
I think that the parent is talking about how much power Google has over mail
delivery within its own system, which encompasses a larger number of people.
If Google decided to switch to a non standard protocol, then smtp'ers would be
left high and dry as Microsoft and Yahoo possibly follow suit to maintain an
advantage.

Speculation of course but it does point out the problem with Google becoming
too big.

------
danbucholtz
Interesting. A few days ago I stopped receiving pull request emails as well.
Granted I routinely delete these after I process them - but I was alarmed when
I checked my spam and saw them there.

------
lolo_
I've had the same experience with the LKML lately (been subscribed for about 8
months, generally spam filter has had v. few false positives), can't remember
exact numbers, but big, big chunks have been incorrectly labelled.

There seems to be a fair bit of spam sent to the LKML, I don't know whether
there's been more lately, but perhaps the large amount of email sent to many
people for the LKML and the fact there's a decent amount of real spam sent
there, combined with a more aggressive setting is an explanation?

~~~
lolo_
Data point: of the 28 messages in my spam folder just now (recently cleared
down after picking out real LKML messages), 8 are LKML, though all are
legitimately spam atm.

------
mathattack
I had an email from a Google recruiter go to the Google spam box. I didn't
have the courage to send her the screen shot.

The lesson I learned is we still need to review the spam box once every day or
two.

------
BorisMelnik
I wonder why Linus chose Google+ as his platform for this? Seem's like he has
been on a spam crusade lately, going after Github last week:
[https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz](https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/WHLxTZnjhmz)

I also can't stand when I get added to a repo and start getting messages from
every single notification.

~~~
ceequof
Linus frequently puts blog posts up on G+, possibly as part of some Google
sponsorship deal.

------
ujjwalg
I wrote an article about spam filtering sometime ago. Context was "Spam
Filtering should not have any False Positives, ever!".

If anyone is interested they can read it here:
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141202174235-36852258--
spam...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141202174235-36852258--
spamfiltering-xkcd-rocks)

------
rsync
Why would Linus be using gmail ?

This is an individual who, in response to broken version control systems
_wrote his own version control system_ which he uses, primarily, to control
versions of the _operating system kernel that he wrote_.

How is it possible that the above described person is moving his wrist around
going clickity-click with a mouse just to read an email ?

~~~
willcodeforfoo
Gmail actually has pretty good keyboard shortcuts...

~~~
rsync
Even if gmail keyboard shortcuts were anywhere near as good or fast as alpine
(they aren't) you still have big bloated responsive AJAX/js pages loading for
every single action.

With alpine over ssh I can use email on a bad 2G cellular connection with no
hassle at all while google won't even load the inbox.

~~~
scholia
Good point. However, Gmail does let you load an HTML version if you want
something less bloated....

------
Zelphyr
Sadly, this is the typical level of quality for just about all Google products
these days in my experience.

------
holic
We've been seeing a huge number of messages sent through Google Groups via our
Google Apps domain flagged as spam. I'm not sure what has triggered it lately,
but it's almost impossible for us to communicate through our Google Groups
email addresses anymore.

------
kolev
Gmail spam filter is definitely not working well for me. Obvious spam is
considered legit and emails from senders that I constantly report as "not
spam" still get into the Junk Mail folder. Outlook.com's spam filter is doing
a way better job for me!

------
avinassh
Every week I usually get about ~200 spams. However last week the number was
really high, some ~600. And without checking I deleted all of them. Now I am
getting worried, if I deleted any legit email :(

Gmail is not my primary email, but still I do get important emails.

------
ivank
Funny, I used to get a ton of false positives in my gmail Spam folder (mailing
lists, marketing I subscribed to, forwards from another address) but with the
recent changes, I have just 1 false positive of 476 in Spam.

------
userbinator
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere at Google, some team are looking at Gmail
stats and congratulating themselves on how much more "spam" they've blocked
with their latest algorithm.

------
michel-slm
I could concur on the false positives -- I've had to repeatedly salvage
mailing list posts marked as spam. Normally from the mailing lists where I
lurk and do not actively contribute, but still...

------
intrasight
All I see in my spam folder is people trying to sell me sex, drugs, credit,
and fake Ray-Ban sunglasses. A quick review of 200 spam messages found one
false positive from a whitewater rafting company.

------
stevewepay
I get about 600 emails a day because I forward everything* from all my email
addresses through a single email account, and I only see 9 spam messages in my
spam box, and they are all spam.

------
lutorm
Just about the only thing that google persistently misclassifies as spam for
me are logwatch emails. There must be a large number of people who don't know
how to turn them off...

------
ciaoben
lot of variables when it comes with spam detectio ... I guess google has
oversimplified some controls, and lot of private server with good reputation
are closed outside.

In our company , ( we are a hosting email solution ) lot of time and human
resources are spent to monitor and work with the work produced by the spam
filters. I guess it is too soon for this kind of solution to be sostituite
with AI.

------
liquidcool
Anyone know if Sendgrid or AWS SES is affected? Or even the email marketing
shops like MailChimp, Aweber, ExactTarget, etc.

------
oldgregg
No accident. Google controls enough of the worlds email now that can just turn
the screws and capture the whole market.

------
usaphp
Wow 3000 spam threads in just 4 days, how can he find time for actual work if
he has so many emails to read/reply!

~~~
allendoerfer
He is a maintainer, reading email is his actual work.

------
kasey_junk
Assumedly my corpus is much lower than his, but I noticed similar things
starting some time "this week".

------
noobie
I've _always_ had problems with Gmail's spam filter, unfortunately.

------
minusSeven
This made me check my own mail box spam and that seems fine so dunno.

------
lancewiggs
So it seems this is clearly happening. The question is what to do about it?

1: Switch from gmail. (I've done this - using Fastmail) 2: Increase publicity
to drive Google to change 3: It's arguably abuse of monopoly power --> take it
to court

------
testercookie2
For some reason I didn't expect Linus to use gmail

------
Animats
Someone pointed out last week that signing up for the Google AppStore seemed
to unblock their email.

Maybe Google is doing this on purpose to apply pain to people without Google
accounts.

------
z3t4
Spam-detection is pretty much solved, with black-lists and white-list. In some
countries it's illegal to send spam, so you can safely add them as white-
list's.

------
applecore
If they're mostly patches and pull requests, why doesn't this guy just
whitelist those email addresses and domains?

~~~
scrollaway
Because there's a lot of new contributors to the kernel, all the time.

------
dljsjr
Runaway DMARC policies perhaps?

------
troymc
I guess we'll just go back to manually making filters.

------
MichaelCrawford
I expect that some people mark a message as spam because they personally
dislike the sender or because they disagree with them.

Say if Told you that your mother wears Army boots.

------
paulpauper
Gmail is terrible in so many ways - Being randomly locked out of your account,
the clunky user-unfriendly interface, the difficulty of marking certain
senders as spam, ...

