What is Gmail doing now?

July 6, 2022 9:52 PM

A friend and I e-mail back and forth a lot. Tonight, we're both getting a notification from Gmail asking if we want to mark the other as spam.

At the top of each message is a gray box saying, "Do you want to continue receiving messages from this sender? Please give us feedback about this message. We won't ask you about this sender again, although you can always unsubscribe or mark it as spam in the future." So we both click Yes, to indicate we want to keep receiving messages. And then, despite Gmail's promise not to ask again, they ask again each time. Anyone know what's up with this and how to fix it?

posted by bryon to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Response by poster: And when MeFi sent me an e-mail notification that my post had gone live, I had the same gray lying box.
posted by bryon at 9:53 PM on July 6, 2022

I can only report that I've never seen a box like this in Gmail before tonight, when it appeared (same wording as yours) on a couple of automated update emails from Amazon and Zillow. I'm not sure whether it will appear again when I get another message from those senders.
posted by fussbudget at 10:06 PM on July 6, 2022

Response by poster: Apologies for threadsitting. My friend and I have been trying this with various other accounts. The box shows up in some and not in others.
posted by bryon at 10:08 PM on July 6, 2022

My guess is Gmail's internal spam classification server is having an outage (likely partial given the symptoms) and in certain cases the spam classification is degrading to a faster but less accurate model. The Gmail spam folks have a reputation for being laser-focused on accuracy, but these systems are notoriously complicated, and an outage somewhere in the stack might have unexpected consequences (like what you're observing).

My guess is that it will resolve itself shortly.
posted by kdar at 11:39 PM on July 6, 2022

I started seeing this yesterday and today. I think its showing up for email where there is a lot of frequency to help train their anti-spam algorithm to minimize false positives.
posted by Mr. Papagiorgio at 11:44 PM on July 6, 2022

I emailed myself (from work admittedly) and was asked the same question.
posted by b33j at 12:17 AM on July 7, 2022

Gmail's entire spam filtering system seems to be on the fritz. In addition to falsely flagging people I know as spam, it's letting positively ridiculous stuff through to the main inbox.

This one was at the top of my inbox:

_$228-For_6Mo(dirtyoldt}of_auto-insurance_Check_if,YouQualifyCJ

I am hard-pressed to identify any element of that subject that should not have tripped a spam filter.

Something is going on over though. I can't find any press on it, but people I know are talking. Shit is getting weird.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:23 AM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Anyone know what's up with this

Somebody moved fast and broke Gmail again.

and how to fix it?

Years ago, I got annoyed enough by Google's innovative approach to random changes to the Gmail UI that I jumped ship to a paid Fastmail account, and I still rate this as one of the more helpful tech choices I've ever made. But if they're not annoying you quite enough to make that an attractive option, you could try setting up a filter rule that checks the mail's From address against your friend's, with an action of "Never send it to Spam".
posted by flabdablet at 8:29 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

As a datapoint: Starting probably two days ago, my "Spam" folder, which usually contained 20 - 50 emails a day, was down to somewhere around 5 - 10 a day and half were 'not spam' emails. Something has definitely changed with how Gmail is handling spam.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:00 AM on July 7, 2022

GMail's spam detection has been terrible for almost a year. I can't send email from my custom (non-Google) domain to my own family, no matter how much they mark it as "not spam" and no matter how many emails go back and forth. If I reply to an email from GMail, still spam. Yet pure gargbage "B^y V__I__A__G__R__A" emails get through. A false positive spam result should be a huge red flag but I don't think anyone is paying attention at Google.
posted by wnissen at 9:03 AM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I saw the same message today on a Patreon email from a creator I support. Seems like Google tweaked something and it's probably not specific to either of your accounts. I would give it a little longer to resolve.
posted by neushoorn at 10:04 AM on July 7, 2022

Best answer: As I thought, it's an incident on Gmail's side:

We are experiencing an issue with Gmail wherein emails delivered between 2022-07-06 20:36 PDT - 2022-07-07 00:08 PDT has a redundant banner notification in the users' inbox.

Impact is limited to Gmail consumers and not to Enterprise customers. New emails delivered post the impact time will not have this incorrect banner.

Our engineering team continues to work on removing the labels from the emails that has this incorrect banner.

We will provide an update by Thursday, 2022-07-07 13:30 US/Pacific with current details.

posted by kdar at 1:20 PM on July 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's almost as if what Peter Welch said in 2014 was right on the money.
posted by flabdablet at 5:19 AM on July 8, 2022 [2 favorites]