Re: [Evolution] Evolution and gmail

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Thu, 2022-08-18 at 10:33 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> On Thu, 2022-08-18 at 04:10 +0200, Ángel wrote:
> > On 2022-08-16 at 23:24 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > > Spam filtering is under the control of the receiver. It's trivial
> > > to
> > > tell Gmail that a message is not spam, and it will learn that for
> > > future reference. You might also look at *why* your mail is being
> > > classified as spam. Could it be that some people have marked it
> > > as
> > > such?
> >
> > Actually, I would consider this a weak point of gmail. As a
> > receiver,
> > you don't know why a message is considered spam (compare that with
> > a
> > system like SpamAssassin, where you can view the scoring of the
> > different modules), and even Google itself would often be unable to
> > determine why the ML engine considered it bad.
>
> This is getting way of topic, but ...
>
> My work uses Microsoft O365.  We have similar issues with bad spam
> filtering at times, including it binning internal mailing list mails.
> The mail admins have tried to get some insight into the spam
> classification process so that we can get some idea how to avoid it,
> but MS won't talk about it because it's proprietary confidential
> information. At first glance that's a "typical big brother" attitude,
> but they say that if the spam classification algorithms are known,
> spammers will just craft emails to get around them, which I can
> understand.  I wonder if Gmail has the same sort of thinking on it.
>
> BTW, we think the reason the mailing list mails were being spam
> binned
> was because we have a very very large userbase (big university, lots
> of
> staff and students), with some compulsory lists for communication.
> All
> it takes is for people to blindly click on "I don't want to see this
> sort of mail any more" thinking it gets them off the list, whereas it
> just increases the spam score and eventually - actually quickly -
> gets
> our mailing list servers globally sunk.

We once had our entire university blacklisted because someone (a
student I think) had spammed some list somewhere. This was years ago
(before we started using G Suite) but it took a deal of effort to have
it corrected.

There is no magic bullet for dealing with spam.

poc