Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cpeterso 2610 days ago
Your comment motivated me to check my Gmail spam folder and 10% (3 out of 30) were false positives, two of which were pretty important. :(
5 comments

I've recently started checking quite regularly my spam folder as I've noticed more and more legit emails ending up there. One of them being support emails from TradeMe (one of New Zealand's biggest sites), keep getting put into spam, even after multiple "mark as not spam", along with some other kinda important emails from TradeMe. I've had to put in manual filters to force an email from TM to skip the spam.
And yet, in my own none Gmail hosted email (fastmail), I currently have 2/55 false positive spam emails. I very rarely ever check it. To note I usually get one actual spam (non newsletter blog spam) to my actual inbox, a month.
TradeMe, like eBay and Banks is a popular target of phishing emails.
I recently missed an email from the UK government regarding a passport application, it went to Spam. Talk about missing the mark!
A spam filter can't whitelist government email. My personal SpamAssassin filters out spam from government servers all the time. The latest was from somewhere in Quebec.

You'd think the various governments would put more effort into computer security. They appear not to care, though.

Me too. 2 "spam" emails in Gmail's trash folder, none of which were spam (one was a newsletter from Mastodon (software)).

Edit: Gah. Now I checked my work Gmail spam folder. There was an email from one of my users there. (and nothing else)

Now I'm considering migrating away from Gmail, at least for work related things.

Me too. I found an invitation for an on-site job interview I would have 100% missed if they had not called me as well.
Likewise I found they filtered an e-mail from my bank about my car loan.
Ditto, Multiple missed emails from factory owner in fuzhou I'm on site doing business with and actively emailing back and forth with daily. Despite the back and forth communication some of the direct messages were in the spam folder. This could have caused me some major issues.