Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?

See also https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/NNnDkY...

(from other threads that we merged hither)

Briefly, this morning, I had the opposite effect happen to my Gmail inbox in which things that would normally land in the social and updates folders ended up in my primary folder. I don't know which I'd be more freaked out by: a broken Gmail spam filter or 18 inches of snow.

It's a great reminder of how good this feature is that we take for granted. I think this outage has actually improved my appreciation for Gmail (a service I normally only complain about).

I have the opposite problem. I'm receiving 30 spams every day with links to Google's own domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414

Thank goodness. My Gmail address is my first name so I typically get many hundreds of spam’s a day which are almost all caught. Dozens in my inbox today so I figured something was up. Glad it’s not that the spam pedlars have suddenly gotten clever.

Google just let through an email spoofed from my own domain (via a mailgun server). It was a phishing attack about the domain being shut down. The connection between the domain name and my personal email address have never been published. Either google or Squarespace leaked the info.

The promotions/updates/forums/etc classification is also down.

Yes, my Gmail inbox is full of regular senders being flagged as "possibly unsafe" and I need to click a button "Looks Safe" to accept them. They are not being spamboxed, but they are definitely flagged. Even official communications from the USPS!

The reason given is that "Gmail hasn't scanned this message", so I suppose the scanners are unavailable/disabled for the time being.

They should also be tagged as "Important" but they are not. I believe this is a heuristic-based designation, and it has not been working too great lately. My most important mail is coming through as "unimportant".

I see nothing amiss on my oldest Gmail account. But then, I get probably <1 spam email a day on average, and even less legitimate mail, and even less that isn't an automatic notification of something or other that's already filtered and categorized by sender.

I seem to be experiencing the opposite! Lots of spam flowing through.

Noticed it immediately. I get a lot more spam messages per day than I thought that I did.

My wife was complaining this morning that her "promotions" were not getting sorted correctly. She will be happy to know it is an actual issue.

Ah, this is why I've been receiving a bunch of very obvious spam/scam mails in my inbox.

I've had Stack Overflow's last newsletter of 2025 land in spam, which was strange because surely they didn't lose relevance that much yet, did they?

The only thing in my gmail spam box is some ad for a pirate tv streaming service that's probably a scam...

I feel like things have been going on a little bit longer than this indicates.

they (gmail/google) must have added AI to the email server.

Ahh. Wok up to a follow up email an address already marked as spam so couldn't figure out what was going on.

Actually having the opposite problem, I'm getting 50+ emails that SHOULD be marked as spam.

I have been receiving a large number of spam emails in my "Important and Unread" areas which is anomalous. I was wondering exactly why and this helps. thanks!

Is this why I keep getting ads in my Primary inbox?

Any ideas on how to deal with stopping spam emails in general, scripts/tools etc?

Interesting, I’ve had a lot of emails lately flagged as “Promotions” even when they were not.

Maybe Gmail knows something?

The weights in their filters are crowd-sourced, so the best thing you can do is mark them as not suspicious (if you are certain, of course).

FWIW, I am not seeing this. My Spam label contains just spam.

Finally, it would be good to know what you are observing. Are you seeing this as recipient or sender?

It's been happening for about a month for me. I had to start monitoring spam because legit emails end up there. Funnily enough I started having the opposite problem too - plenty of obvious spam and phishing attempt ending up in my mailbox.

I had to make a bunch of filters on my side.

One more reason to migrate to Proton

Yep, getting this too.

I have seen a spam button show up I haven't seen in a long time.

It might be a new round of AI training featuring the labour of customers as free employees doing training. Every time we click, we consent to sharing private email data.

Two related issues not mentioned yet:

Its really slow. Too slow to use 2FA or in some cases, verify email addresses or recover passwords.

Most people can't handle a notification on their watch every minute, or several spam every five minutes, so "large numbers of people" are shutting off notifications on their phones. And human nature being what it is, they're not going to be turned back on again. So the era of getting a notification when you get an email is coming to a close. "Important Immediate Attention Stuff" moved to text messages a long time ago anyway, at least for me. The list of technologies you can no longer reach me on, always increases over time...

Now, what about the Messages app? Starting last December I started receiving 10 spam SMS messages a day. Previously it was maybe one per week.

Good on Google for having clear and timely outage notifications even for a minor to moderate subservice like spam detection.

[flagged]

I don't understand why spam detection is so complicated. I can tell with high accuracy if an email is spam just by the subject line. I'd think even basic ML could do this very reliably you don't need a bleeding-edge LLM to do this.

Phishing is tricker because it can be very deceptive especially if you're being targeted specifically. But also usually pretty obvious.