[programmertote]

Not related to using LLMs for writing email, but something that bothers me about using Gmail lately.

There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.

[Unai]

If you're gonna go off-topic, I wanna join.

How absolutely terrible is the box where you write the emails in web Gmail? I get you need more features than what a simple <textarea> provides, but how can a trillion dollar company make such an absolutely broken piece of crap as the most important part of one of their key products? You delete something and the cursor goes to the end of the email. You ctrl-z and the cursor goes before the first character of the email, not before modifying a string of a completely random length. Like a year ago, and for like a month, there was an area on the right side that didn't accept any clicks at all. Native keyboard shortcuts constantly violated.

We figured out WYSIWYG decades ago, how can it be this bad? I've resorted to writing my emails on a notepad app and pasting them when they are done. I thought it had to be an issue with some browser extensions or something, because I've never heard anyone else complaining about it, but no, it really is that bad.

[conductr]

I’ll pile on this one. I’ve never quite figured out some of the common formatting icons they use. Text color and text background fill color I guess wrong every single time and think “why is that icon used for that”. I can never find how to edit bullet types. Simple stuff that I never struggle to locate and identify in any other application

[hogwasher]

YES. Not just the Google class action notices - though those, which Google was court-ordered to send and deliver, are the most egregious - but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder no matter what.

And they don't ever forward spam, even if you've set up mailbox forwarding to an external address. There's no option for it. So to ever see those messages, I have to use a complicated custom rule to force it to forward all the spam to me, too.

I think it's too consistent and longlasting a problem to be accidental. I think they're spam-holing all class action notices, instead of just Google ones, so that they can claim it's just a general error in their automatic spam filter.

[dspillett]

> but ALL class action or settlement related emails get automatically chucked into to my gmail spam folder

Every now and then I get a glut of “if you bought X in timeframe Y you might be due a pay-out” junk mail, so this might be genuine false positives rather than something more sinister.

Though the cynic in me, that has been right so many times over the years wrt corporate behaviour, is inclined to agree with your much less generous assessment!

[Dylan16807]

There is exactly zero chance the gmail team is unaware that epiqnotice.com is a legitimate sender of class action messages and getting falsely blocked.

[dspillett]

There is also zero chance that there are not a fair few people who consider their messages to be UCE¹ even if they are actually due thruppence-ha'penny as their share of the class action win, and who therefore mark them as such which is a signal that automated filter management algorithms will pick up on.

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[1] They are email, from a commercial entity, and in many cases were not asked for, after all.

[Dylan16807]

And those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts in this case. Or be disabled entirely for the domain.

I'm not accusing them of making the problem on purpose, I'm accusing them of not fixing it on purpose.

The notice may be from a commercial entity but it's court-ordered. It's not spam.

[dspillett]

> The notice may be from a commercial entity but it's court-ordered. It's not spam.

How is the filtering algorithm expected to know that? Especially if numerous users do mark such messages as spam (or give the more passive signal of completely ignoring it despite paying attention to other messages), or other identification rules say that the messages look like other things that have been thusly marked over time?

> those automated algorithms based on feedback need to not cross user accounts

One of the touted advantages of collective mail systems like gmail is that such filtering can apply globally instead of us all having to individually train everything to our liking. There are conflicting priorities, and unfortunately your preferred priority just isn't winning here.

[Caveat: I don't use Google's mail services for anything other than occasional testing, like sending messages to/from my own mail server after reconfiguration or other admin work]

[philipwhiuk]

> it's court-ordered. It's not spam.

Personally my definition of spam allows for court-ordered spam

[a96]

But there is a non-zero chance that the false blocking can happen without any human intervention.

[Dylan16807]

So what?

Not fixing it for multiple years means it's on purpose. (Unless they had some ridiculous cuts to the team size.)

[zapatos]

I have a filter to never send email to the spam folder if it contains the word "settlement" in the subject, to work around this annoying issue.

[phyzome]

GMail users sometimes don't see my messages because they get sent to spam. (These are just normal person-to-person emails.)

Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.