[JimDabell]

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers?

Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months. If emails like that aren’t safe from Google’s spam filter, then no emails are safe from Google’s spam filter.

[CPLX]

Yeah that happens all the time, to the point where I had to add specific rules in Google Workspace to never send those to spam. Same with other transactional emails like receipts from some places that I had marked as "not spam" 4 times and Google still couldn't figure out the next one.

[PennRobotics]

Yeah, something wrong with the filter.

Google marked several Samsung mobile phone order confirmation emails as phishing messages a week or two ago. Nobody sells more Android phones than Samsung, so they should be one of Google's top partners to accommodate correctly 100% of the time.

[Manouchehri]

Without knowing anything about the details, is it possible Samsung leaked their SMTP credentials, and Google was seeing phishing to a few of their users?

[cj]

I don’t disagree with you, but before assuming it’s the fault of gmail classifier I would look at Google Workspace admin configuration. There are a lot of settings that admins can tweak and toggle that can mess with email deliverability. You can even create specific rules that only apply when users within the same workspace are emailing each other.

Google Workspace can even be configured to use an external smtp service behind the scenes. Can also be configured to proxy emails through 3rd parties (in which case the email might be leaving the Google ecosystem and then reentering it from a non-Google IP). There’s a lot of silly (seemingly unnecessary) features on the admin side that could trip up a spam filter.

[JimDabell]

In this case it was a super-basic setup. Nothing weird going on, just an internal email within the same Google account, sent from the Gmail web interface and going straight to the spam folder for the recipient, no filtering rules or anything like that.