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

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Spam/Filtering Outage Symptoms

  • Many report a sudden change: legit emails (USPS, HR, system, newsletters) marked as spam or “suspicious,” sometimes delayed 7–10 minutes.
  • “Never mark as spam” and Priority Inbox importance markers appear to be ignored or reset for some accounts.
  • Others see the opposite: obvious spam (419 scams, fake package deliveries, phishing about cloud payments, “legal boner tea”) landing in Primary or “Important & Unread.”
  • Google’s status page links to a spam-filtering incident; some note banners saying messages couldn’t be scanned, with “Looks/Seems safe” prompts.

Tabs & Classification (Primary/Promotions/etc.)

  • Promotions/Updates/Social categorization is widely reported “down”: promotions show up in Primary or aren’t separated at all.
  • Some say this has been broken for months; one claim ties tab classification to a toggle that also opts email content into AI training, leading them to turn it off and rely on heavy unsubscribing.
  • Another commenter asserts that tie-in “never happened” and was misinformation; a rebuttal says the issue is in court and unresolved.

User Impact

  • Missed or delayed 2FA, account verification, HR and school enrollment emails.
  • Increased noise in inboxes pushes people to disable notifications, further reducing email’s role for time‑critical communication.
  • A few see no issue at all, suggesting the problem may be localized or settings-dependent.

Mitigation Strategies Discussed

  • Short term: frequently check spam, mark legit mail as “not spam,” star key senders; some expect Google to roll back a bad model in 24–48 hours.
  • Using multiple accounts, Gmail “+aliases,” custom domains with wildcard addresses, and services like “Hide My Email” to track and kill compromised addresses.
  • Some disable Gmail spam filtering entirely and rely on local clients (Thunderbird, rspamd, SpamSieve, Bayesian filters) or self‑hosted mail servers.

Views on Gmail & Alternatives

  • Several say this outage highlights how exceptionally good Gmail’s spam filtering usually is; others argue it has long been too aggressive with false positives.
  • Some see it as a final nudge to migrate to providers like Proton or self‑hosting, for both reliability and privacy, though others note most mail still traverses “big corp” servers.