I keep winding up in people's spam folders - why?

August 28, 2021 4:48 AM

Three times this week, I've been told my email wound up in someone's spam folder. Using Gmail via the web on my Dell laptop. Two were asking if they had work for me, the third I was asking for clarification on marketing efforts on the part of the publisher of an author I work for. What am I doing wrong that this is happening?
posted by The Almighty Mommy Goddess to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

+1 to spitbull, I have used the spam lie to cover my struggle with timely replies many times.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 5:37 AM on August 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

My personal favorite spam lie was a coworker who I sent a somewhat spicy but absolutely correct email to. Within minutes of sending it they showed up in my Microsoft teams chat with the 3 dots of typing a message. But then never sent a message. And several days later explained their delay in response because my email went to their spam folder. Sure ok you mastermind genius.

Unless you have something weird like Princess of Nigeria written in your email signature, I'm going to agree with others this is not a real thing.
posted by phunniemee at 5:55 AM on August 28, 2021

My spam catches important things all the time, including emails from collaborators responding to a chain where we've been talking back and forth. "It got caught in spam" is not always a lie. That said, I check my spam every day because of this. It's my responsibility because my spam detector is clearly broken. There is never any rhyme or reason to what gets pulled in there, so the people that email me couldn't possibly have replied in a different way that wouldn't have got caught by spam. I wouldn't worry about it too much beyond spelling things properly and not using phrases like "job opportunity" or "looking for work," both of which have slightly spammy flavors.
posted by twelve cent archie at 5:57 AM on August 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Just as an added datapoint: I too get caught in spam folders sometimes for real, and once in a rare while I find other people's legitimate messages in my own spam folder. Last year I sent a message from my organizational email address to another person's address at the same org, and it still got filtered. No idea why. (The organization was using Google as its mail provider.) I know it got filtered because I looked over the recipient's email account remotely with them to see what had happened to the missing email, since they weren't very tech savvy and didn't know how to look for it themselves.

The last false positive I found in my own spam folder was from someone I've been corresponding with back and forth for years, and there was nothing in that email that should have set anything off as far as I could tell.
posted by trig at 6:25 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Gmail spam seems to go through periods where the false positives suddenly spike up for a few days to weeks. Don't know if it's a random variation, or maybe they are messing with the spam filters, but it happens.
posted by COD at 6:36 AM on August 28, 2021 [5 favorites]

Are you sending email as [e-mail] or are you using gmail to send and receive from a different email account like [e-mail]?

There are some alias settings in there that if not correctly applied can get you flagged more often.
posted by chasles at 6:53 AM on August 28, 2021 [4 favorites]

seconding what COD says, Gmail seems to go through waves of producing spam, and it can get their IP addresses listed as suspect to outside mail providers.
posted by nickggully at 7:25 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Only because you mention publishers and authors, I'll say this: I'm a freelance book editor and I find good emails in my spam probably 6-10 times per year. It's usually an author asking if I'd be interested in working with them. There's nothing obviously spamlike about these inquiries, but maybe there's some magical combo of publishing-related words that's triggering the Gmail filter? At any rate, I have trained myself to check my spam folder daily.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:32 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I found an important email in my spam folder last week. Gmail changes their algorithm often, and sometimes it's too aggressive. You're welcome to send me a test email.
posted by theora55 at 8:30 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ransomware often uses email to infect company networks so as a safety measure many organizations are very aggressive in flagging emails sent outside their @worksite.com email address.
posted by mundo at 9:43 AM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

My Gmail’s spam filter has been overly aggressive for a few months. Important docusign work emails, emails about a committee I took over running when a coworker left this summer, probably other things I haven’t caught yet.

I have had more issues with emails people don’t like getting and thus are more likely to mark as spam. But who knows.
posted by nat at 11:17 PM on August 28, 2021

Are you sending email as [e-mail] or are you using gmail to send and receive from a different email account like [e-mail]?

If it is the latter, then you could use a blacklist checker like this one from MxToolbox. - enter domain part of your email address and it will tell you the any blacklists that this domain appears on. It is not uncommon for your particular email account to be innocent - but for your domain to nevertheless appear on a blacklist because other accounts using the same ISP have been sending out spam.
posted by rongorongo at 12:40 AM on August 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think Google's spam filtering is a Machine Learning / AI type algorithm; this would explain the cyclical nature of the spikes: the algorithm "learns" to defeat the spammers, then the spammers come up with a new technique, so the algorithm has to "learn" new patterns and gets a little more aggressive while doing so, then someone at Google trains it to back off a little. Lather, rinse repeat
posted by TimHare at 9:05 AM on August 30, 2021