Is Gmail’s Spam Filtering Failing For You, Too?
That’s the question I posed on Twitter this morning, and I’ve already seen a number of positive and similar responses. I started to notice a change for the worse about three or four weeks ago. I’m getting pounded with spam in both my personal Gmail account and my GigaOM Google Apps for Domain Inbox. A fair number, perhaps half or more, are in foreign languages, so they’re doubly wasted on me: I can’t even understand the spam! 
I’d love to see some way to “reset” the spam filtering in Gmail for situations like this. Checking Google’s Gmail Help section on removing spam tells me that “the more spam you mark, the better our system will get at weeding out those annoying messages.” Ironically, I’m finding lately that the exact opposite is happening: I’m marking more and more messages as spam, but getting even more (or at least as many) in return. Back in late 2007, Google reported fairly impressive spam-filtering statistics. I may look around to see if that data has been updated lately.
It’s getting so bad that it’s taking at least 15 to 30 minutes of my day to mark items as spam in the two accounts. That’s simply too much effort. Is it just me and a few other folks on Twitter, or have you noticed this of late as well? I’m still thinking that, like sending a piece of snail-mail, maybe we should be charged a minimal micro-payment for every e-mail we send. Oy!
Just turn on postini for your google apps. Postini is great, I use postini both for my Gmail-account and for my Exchange account. I never get any spam anymore.
Unfortunately I don’t think google uses postini for the free version of gmail…
And micro-payment?! That’s Heresy… shame.
To pay for each email is basically punishing the victim. Why should I have to pay for the unscrupulous acts of others? I think it’s payment enough that I spend 3-4 hours twice a week deleting, have been doing it for months, but just can’t keep up.
As usual, the spammers are winning. Every battle they wage against filters always ends the same way. Clearly a better solution needs to be put into place to combat spam at its source. We do not have to change how we use email, but instead change who we want to contact us. Content filtering doesn’t work, spammers gets around it, you get emails filtered out that are not suppose to and that you really need.
An anti-spam system needs to only allow communication with people (contacts) that you want to communicate with. Similar to facebook or linkedin do you really want some random person, you don’t know communicating with you. When an email is sent to you, you only want a trusted contact sending you email. This is the only way to solve the problem.
Such an anti-spam system exists. Sendio.com makes an appliance that does just that, establishes a trusted network of contacts based on who you email. It is a simple, straight forward email and puts you back in control of your inbox.
Hmm, well, I’ve got 6 email accounts on the go which between them get thousands of spam messages a day, but I only see perhaps 3 a day in my Exchange inbox thanks to a combination of the email provider filters, Outlook and my own rules (Acai berry anyone)?
1/2 hour a day must be really annoying Kevin, it truly is a modern curse. My daughter is 12 and of course now wants her own email account, which will soon be filled up with all sorts of sexual spam so I’m evaluating the best email solution for her, along with having a talk about the perils of the internet!
Same here ..
Having GAFYD (gmail for my domain) AND postini.
All mailboxes are being spammed like crazy the last couple of weeks.
Having the impression the spamfilter is either down or working only partly. My domain never had spam before.. well ok maybe 1 or 2 per 3 months.
Hope google picks it up and sorts it out.
Every 4 days or so, I get 5-7000 spams and about 300 pieces of junk mail in my gmail account. My solution is private accounts for people and businesses I want to hear from. That works in one account and the other isn’t bad. I keep hearing about this wonderful gmail spam filter. It takes me days to go through them all, so I have to delete them all. That, and all the junk mail are about all I can find time for. How do I make it work? I miss a lot just because I don’t have time to read my inbox.
I have noticed a difference in the type of spam recently.
A very slight increase in spam for me. All seem to be from the same spammer varying slightly each time
However, gmail has been pretty good overall over the years.
Wow. I don’t have my own website or anything like that, so I don’t get nearly as many messages as the rest of you I’m sure, but I use my Gmail to sign up for everything and have never had an issue with spam on it. In fact, it’s been better at filtering spam than my paid-for Fastmail account.
I don’t have a website either. But I get bombarded with spam. I think I have it down to maybe 6-800 spams a day, and 200+ pieces of junk in my inbox. Still a huge timewaster. I get little done spending my online time deleting and hunting through it all for something I want. I just learned this week that my aunt has been emailing me since May. I looked for her emails every time I go online and didn’t see them. What’s really sad is that she is blaming me, and has stopped communicating. Please, gmail, do something fast.
btw.. google is aware of the issue and working on it appearantly.
“Hi everyone, thanks for reporting this problem with our spam filters. We’re looking into it as I type, and we’ll get it corrected as soon as we can. In the meantime, please continue to mark any misclassified messages as “Spam.” Not only will you get the messages out of your inbox — you’ll also be helping us to fix the problem!”
See http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=60eda5b723e1b393&hl=en&fid=60eda5b723e1b393000469d1bd71d9c7 for full thread.
I’ve noticed that the spam folder fills up faster (I mostly ignore it, but occasionally go through to see if I’m missing something important).
Sounds like a nightmare.
Hmmm ,,, interesting.
I am using 2 gmail accounts and the spam filter for me is 99.9% perfect. I get maybe a hundred or so spam messages a day and very few make it into my inbox. I might get a spam in my inbox maybe once a week.
Can’t say I’ve noticed a change. Very little spam shows up in my inbox.
One or two a day slip through the filter, but not too bad.
But I DO have a problem with GMail locking up on me – stuck on LOADING…. or WORKING… and requires a browswer refresh to escape it. It’s annoying enough that I’m occasionally wandering over to my Zoho account, where the mail is fowarded to. Especially since Zoho gives a nice way to read the mail.
I have the same problem, in the same time frame. About 4 weeks ago a deluge of ‘employment’ spam showing in Gmail (and for what it’s worth Joe, my paid Fastmail has been clean for the two years I’ve had it).
Heh.. me too. Even wrte a haiku about it a few weeks ago:
Gmail spam filters
At one time you ruled email
now are made of fail
Are you forwarding multiple email domains into one gmail account? As far as i can see, spam notification only affects the main account and wont work on the forwarded accounts.
Not sure what the answer is right now.
Nope. I don’t FW mail from one to the other. I use two separate tabs in my browser all day: one for each account.
No I am not forwarding any email domains into my gmail account.
Hmm, I have not seen a spam increase in my GMail account. I get about one per day and that doesn’t seem to be increasing. FYI, I’ve had this account for about 2 years, so it’s not new.
I have noticed an increase but its been more of a (almost) none to trickle – not a flood.
And a micro payment system breaks down when SPAMers are hijacking systems… then you’d have spam & a bill!
Yup. Not my favorite idea. I have 2 other email accounts. In several months, I got I spam in one acct, and two in the other. (But that one has been discovered so now I’m getting some junk.) Hopefully I can nip it in the bud.
I have several gmail boxes and a GAFYD account with several additional boxes. None of them are showing any increase in unfiltered spam lately.
Regarding the micropayment suggestion, the anti-spam research group published a draft protocol for SMTP postage late last year (click my name). The unanswered question is whether anyone can build such a system that can both handle the payment volume and also pay for itself.
Spammers probably won’t be deterred by micropayments. Home users will suffer 2 indignations instead of one.
I had the opposite problem about three weeks ago – Gmail Spam got a bit trigger happy and started marking all my emails from Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting) as spam. I had to use the “Not Spam” button on a couple of hundred emails before Gmail got the message that Stratfor was not a source of spam.
I’ve seen perhaps two or three spams get through their filtering in the last month.
Certainly, my email address isn’t published as much as yours is, and i basically only use it for personal emails–not even signing in at various websites.
But i’ve NEVER had a problem with spam. I rarely even get any that go to the “spam” folder–MAYBE 1 a month, if that.
I too noticed a dramatic increase in my spam box around a month ago. Up until then I had very few spam emails but now am deluged. Something is wrong somewhere!!!
I’ve seen a marked increase in the spam I’m getting via gmail. And it isn’t very difficult to tell it is spam either. Most comes via email addresses I never use, from foreign companies.
no spam filter is perfect, jackass
So 7000 spams & 2-300 pieces of junk in my inbox in 4 days is standard? I wonder how many I’d get without a spam filter. Darn right, it’s not perfect, but this is ridiculous.
I don’t think we’re jackasses.
don’t blame gmailm blame the spammers. gmail is not your slave, and you are not paying a shit for it. not satisfied? try another webmail service.
Actually, we do pay for Gmail. As I said in the article, this is happening in my Google Apps for Domains mail account as well. What I don’t pay for (nor tolerate for long) is unnecessary foul language. First and last warning…
I too am fed up with all the profanity on the web. Why not use it as a place to practice manners? Furthermore, when I am told I’m getting the best spam filter, then I expect the best spam filter. Free or not, I pay because I can’t get any work done, and can’t find important emails for months. I intend to try another email service. But months of deleting hasn’t enabled me to clear out the gmail account. The problem is too big.
I can’t say I’m being hammered, but am seeing maybe 3 or 4 spam messages a day in my inbox that would never have got through in the past. This is only for the last month or so. It’s not a big problem, but it’s making me go “hmm” and worry about the thin end of the wedge.
I can’t begin to tell you how ticked off I get with all the Chinese emails I get. Google should get with the program and add a feature that allows it’s users to ban certain domains/countries if they so wish. I would love to ban a few people too but it takes forever for Google to finally stop all their mail.
I, too, started getting emails from both Asia and France in the kast month. Also a lot of fake requests for help.
Google brought me here due to my frustration with the increase of spam that has been getting through to my personal Gmail inbox. I never used to get spam in my inbox, zero, but now I am getting anywhere between 10-20 spams a day which are typically lottery or inheritance scams.
My Google Apps accounts are safe for now, but if they suffer a similar fate it may be time to look for alternatives.
I pipe all my email to gmail, then I pipe it all through a local spam filter (CRM114). I get close to 1000 spam messages a day (I’ve had a public email address for well over a decade), so the comparison is fairly striking.
Until the past several weeks, I’d say CRM114 did a slightly better job. Lately, however, Google is failing miserably. I’d say I get about 3 spams through a day on CRM114, and the same mail corpus has well over 10 times that many getting through on Gmail.
They all have the same words in the subjects and I train gmail on them several times a day. I see no decrease in the number getting through after a week of doing this.
There’s definitely something broken here.
I have been noticing about 5-10 getting through a day recently (past 2 weeks), which is annoying only because I NEVER used to get ANY. Please, whats happening?? I hate it so much.
I’ve noticed the same trend. In fact that’s what led me here, to this blog post.
I find it annoying that I went from getting maybe 1 spam e-mail in my inbox every few months or so, to getting anywhere between 10 and 20 per day. It’s not too huge a problem I suppose, but it’s annoying as all get out.
Though it might sound messed up, I take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone in this. I can only hope that Google gets a handle on the problem as soon as possible though. I really do enjoy GMail, but I’ll drop it like a bad habit if the problems don’t improve.
I’m being overspammed lately. There’s nothing Gmail can do, it seems. The problem is:
- They don’t filter inside certain html tags
- They lower the filtering process with subjects
- The spams usually contain unrelated keywords to confuse detection.
Hope Google’s Wave system will change all that.
Keeps happening to me too and its driving me MAD!
My experience is the same: All the sudden a huge increase in spam in my inbox as of this month. I looked through this whole thread for some sort of solution. Darn it.
JUNE 1ST 2009 MONDAY MORNING…
Getting hammered here too.
It’s a recent problem like the last 30 days. 1 , then 2 then 4, then 8 , now it’s every hour.
I don’t have ANY CONTACTS.
I don’t have CHAT (that’s what port 6667 IRC is for)
I pop3 everything and (no html) read only in text (thebat! windows or pine in linux)
I’ve started taking to adding filters by ip number or broken CIDR into gmail’s filters.
For example 95.162.13.146 just slipped through.
Logon Gmail | Create a Filter |
Has the words: 95.162.13.
It’s sort of a “fake cidr” kind of address. I wish we could ban by cidr at google.
I dunno how much more I will continue this manual nonsense. Since I have to drop what I am doing F9 into the headers, wade through, logon to gmail (when I am popping normally), then add the filter.
Sadly I used the account as a domain contact, so I need to decide relatively quick.
The ONLY thing I can think of that happened, is I was recently forced to bind my youtube account to my gmail account. It seems (although I can’t prove it) that is when the spam started. Coincidence? I don’t know. Hopefully Gmail folks read this thread.
Also some of the UCE spam I get is really evil, threats and stuff.. heh heh heh
I don’t never in my life remember getting threats in my inbox..
Really gmail has done an OUTSTANDING JOB up to about a month ago.
PS I think it could be tightened down for a whole country using on less on the dotted quad.. ex:
source 95.162.13.146
filter 1 level 95.162.13.
filter 2 level 95.162.
filter 3 level 95.
Sadly the problem becomes the random ip’s that could match. But oh well, that’s what whitelists are for.
network not country… (slap’s self) heh..
Good luck!
Glad to see I’m not alone. Gmail blocked all my spam until about a month ago… then it slowly turned into a trickle, then a steady stream, and as of last night it’s started pouring. Roughly 15 messages between bedtime last night and waking up this morning (June 1). What are we going to do?
Yep yep.. Absolutely Andrew.. Something is b0rked.
I found this thread using the searching for gmail +spam and it’s the ONLY relevant thread right now. Everything else is like 15 days behind us.
What I am going to do is what I just said.
Personally I won’t read webmail… e.g. mail through a web browser. It’s dangerous. I won’t get into why, but I simply don’t. So pop3 your mail off, and only work logged onto gmail to create a filter or change settings. (I am not getting into how to set this up, find it for you client and learn it.)
NEVER READ MAIL IN A BROWSER.
Second, a simple tool you can use is samspade, to look up ip address’s, it can give you an idea which country the attack might come from.
Whitelist your mission critical friends.
These are just ideas quickly off the top of my head.
btw- i probably will switch my domain contact after I have my coffee… o)
Not sure what else important I have coming in right now as 3278 messages that are legit…need to be glanced over.
The other thing I do is when I have to add a filter I clear all the other crap out. EVERYTHING, that way I KNOW what’s new even it it’s somehow backdated.
Like I said, good luck.
This morning I have 14 new messages in my GigaOm Inbox, which is a Google Apps account. 9 of the 14 are spam messages that got through Google.
Unfortunately, this is typical since I wrote the post. Google did contact me directly after I wrote the post and offered to look into my account. At the time, I declined as I thought perhaps I was causing the issue through my iPhone mail client, i.e.: I was deleting spam there, not moving it to the Spam folder. Since then I have been moving spam on the iPhone and it hasn’t helped, so late last week, I circled back to my contact at Google. I gave them the OK to look at my account and see what they could find. Once I hear back, I’ll provide an update.
I found a gmail help site and reported this yesterday, can’t find it today. I think Gmail in being innundated with people yelping. Their one solution – mark it as spam, is just a pacifier. My question, is there any better email providers for just the regular joe that doesn’t have all the techno abilities that I have seen posted here?
Same problem. Gmail needs to address this publicly.
Hi… exactly the same problem here. Most spam comes as a simple subject line (which looks obviously like spam), and with a single embedded image. Normally I don’t view/download images, but I did start popping email from gmail via my iPhone a couple of months ago. I wonder if this is causing my email address to be registered on spam hot-lists?
Either way, if my account gets any more spam (about 20 or so a day right now), I will either see if I can just whitelist my contacts (and block everyone else out), or close the account (which is a shame, as up until a month ago, it has been really good… I have had the address for years).
Kevin, glad to hear that you’re letting Google take a look at your account. Please let us know what you hear from them.
In the meantime, the internet is slowly picking up on this issue. A search for “gmail spam” in Google News shows a couple hits, the topic is gaining ground on reddit.com, and there are a lot of posts on the Gmail Help forum. Will be interesting to see where this goes in the next 24-48 hours.
http://www.mxlogic.com/securitynews/spam/gmail-users-reporting-major-spam-uptick463.cfm
June 1, 2009
I had no problems until this weekend. This morning I have about thirty spam messages. What are the options besides Yahoo and Gmail?
Yes – me too! Big increase in g-mail spam in the last couple weeks. Mine are almost exclusively Nigerian Inheritance scams. Oh Mighty G-mail, save us!
Yes, seeing a big increase in SPAM the last few weeks to my Google Apps email inbox. Wonder what changed?!
Is it me, or did it suddenly slow down in spam department in the inbox? Somebody must be doing their job.
what is a spam
mail you don’t want, often from a fake entity. Often spammers try to get personal information. They can use it to sell to other companies, send you more & more spam, commit identity theft, use your credit card numbers and more. All the people with whom they share your info start spamming you too. Even clicking on a website, without opening it, can get you on that company’s spam list. I also get both phone calls and spam daily from one company.
I have the opposite problem. Because I forward my all my works emails from several domains to my Gmail account (and have others on my server doing the same thing) Gmail is now pretty much marking everything not going to my gmail address as SPAM and I have to now teach Gmail was is not SPAM. I know I am missing a lot of good messages because of this and I can’t figure out how to avoid it. I get 2,500 messages a day (mostly SPAM of course) so going through the SPAM folder is a waste of time. This all kicked in a few weeks ago. I am told that this would not be the case if I had everyone send me email at my Gmail account but that is not practical. It goes without saying that I am at my wits end with SPAM.
I don’t have a problem getting Gmail spam, but I do get several spams a week peddling phony drugs. One of the hosting sites for the drug ad seems to be hosted by a Gmail user, bao2500@gmail.com,IP 91.213.33.10, address Izhevsk 426054 Russia. Has anyone else experienced this?
Could you be talking about acai berries? I don’t know if it’s the same as yours, but they have been incredibly tenacious: I’ve had hundreds. I too am now also getting them in foreign languages. And I have started getting the ones that ask you to send money so they can send money back. Plus the free government grants. etc. I wonder what I miss. I can’t scan 5000 emails every 4 days. I have to delete. Most days, I log on, delete all the junk mail that gets to my inbox, then I’ve been online as long as I can. Important work isn’t getting done and mail I want gets lost in the hugeness of it.
How many of you have considered that the more quickly and precisely you mark off SPAM in gmail, the more valuable YOU become as a spam filter to google? Yes, you are serving the community at large, at least.
exor – if so many of us in your “community” are marking it as spam, is Google doing its job for the community, or are we doing the job for Google? I am finding more and more spam cluttering my e-mail, which I feel should be filtered away by the e-mail provider who touted less spam.
Bookermom, I would definitely ask for my money back if your that unhappy with how Gmail is working for you.
UPDATE: I posted on 8/22/09 about Gmail marking all my forwarded email as SPAM. I happy to say that has now stopped, mostly because I was able to reduce the spam being sent with my forwarded email and I guess Gmail likes my domains again.
We need permission based emailing.
ie: The first time someone emails you they receive a link to a form. On that form they fill out their identification and a captcha and *request* access to your inbox.
After that they are allowed to email you.
You only receive requests for access from people who go to the page and fill out the form. This is a huge roadblock for spammers.
gmail needs a few antispam labs choices.
A user controlled SpamAssassin lab for gmail would be sublime.
Also allow user controlled filters for MTA rejection.
Lastly add to gmail filer actioins “mark as spam”.
^ TDMA for gmail would be wildly entertaining
^^ gmail filtering is pathetilame. We need be able to search
any header (contents)
any header (exists)
wildcards