this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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I know it's "big evil corporate overlord", but Gmail is pretty damned good at it, really.
If I get spam from a company I recognize I gave my email to, I'll go in it and click the unsubscribe button and do it that way. Anyone else and I just mark it as spam and Gmail does a pretty good job of sending swaths of junk emails into the spam folder. I don't get much that slips through. Very occasionally I'll sign up for something I'm supposed to get an email for but don't, and I'll find it in the spam folder. If I think I'll want more emails from that company, I move it to my regular folder.
Most spam i get is from a random @gmail address as source, can't be that great. And they are shit with attachements.
Tell us you don't understand how the "From" header works without telling us.
FYI, that is really just a text string. Most providers don't let you change it, but its not exactly hard to falsify. People are largely ignorant of the fact that email mostly isnt trustworthy. Spammers abuse this ignorance constantly.
In order to send email as another address, gmail requires you to verify the address by sending you an email there first. AFAIK, they never re-verify, but that's the main weakness I see.
There's a large org (@ hope.net) that has a non-profit convention every few years. It maintains a e-mail list to let its > 1000 previous attendees know about the upcoming convention and related info. In the past decades everything was fine.
This year (con in July) Gmail has been spam-binning ALL of those reminder e-mails aimed at attendees who use Gmail. Quite clearly it's not the users making that choice. The org is left with no other way to contact those attendees.
Then my guess is that someone got ahold of that email list and started using it to send spam and that caused Gmails algorithm to start flagging anything sent out to a bunch of members of that email group at the same time as such.
Maybe someone spoofed the From field on some spam, using their email address. Thereby marking that From address as a spammer. I've seen this happen both ways.
Have a read on the trouble the 2600 guys have been having sending out emails for the next HOPE conference - the junk filter is also great at filtering out topics it deems unsuitable.