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Google Launches Gmail Postmaster Tools To Eliminate Spam
Mark Wilson writes: Spam is a problem that is not going away for anyone who receives email — and who doesn't? Over the years Google has taken steps to try to reduce the amount of junk that reaches Gmail inboxes and today the company is taking things a step further with Gmail Postmaster Tools and enhanced filter training for Gmail. Part of the problem with spam — aside from the sheer volume of it — is that the detection of it is something of an art rather than a science. It is all too easy for legitimate email to get consigned to the junk folder, and this is what Gmail Postmaster Tools aims to help with. Rather than helping recipients banish spam, it helps senders ensure that their messages are delivered to inboxes rather than filtered out.
Rather than helping recipients banish spam, it helps senders ensure that their messages are delivered to inboxes rather than filtered out.
And how long before spammers use it to ensure the spam hits the inbox?
So now I need to open a Google account to make sure my outgoing e-mails reach Gmail?
It is getting harder and harder to avoid using their services.
I know that some people are looking at that 'help companies get their mail into inboxes rather than filtered' comment with trepidation. But I don't think it's nefarious like that. I work at a small university, and it's pretty common (and frustrating for students) to have important emails like 'Here is how you log in for the first time' get filtered out as spam because the same email is sent to thousands of students... it looks like spam. These tools just let us register our domain and add tags to our emails marking it as official email from the school.
That still allows the user algorithms to reduce the significance of the email, tossing it in the 'Advertisement' category, or 'Low Priority', or other variations of 'not spam, but maybe you'd like to hide it anyway' category. But it should reduce how ofter the email is thrown away completely, and they can't even search for it because it was tossed out with the garbage.
I took a look at the postmaster tools, and as soon as the DNS update goes through (which proves to Google that I'm allowed to manage our postmaster tools) I'll have a better idea what options it gives us.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I can finally rest easy knowing all the advertisements for penis enhancement will come straight to my inbox. No more hunting around in the spam box for these important emails.
... as it is, they offer no way for little people with the desire to run mailservers from IPs within the larger ISP's address space to mark their server as legit.
I'd like to run my own mailserver again, to do end-to-end encryption and stay out of the big providers' NSA dragnets. But it's pretyt much impossible now to run an SMTP service from a residential IP.
I used my same email address for years on some mail lists, with relatives and various other places. I don't get spam hardly ever. I might have gotten one spammer mail in the last year. Is it really that bad for everyone else?
Been using it for years and have never received spam. You can add individual addresses or entire domains and all your contacts are automatically included as well.
Except that Google basically just has a better spam filter for gmail accounts now too.
Either way, good for Google. The more awareness that can get out there for improved sender validation the better.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
It would probably help if they could at least get "whitelisting" right: if I explicitly reply or send an email to a certain address, it should consider all emails from that email address as not-spam by default from then on (apart maybe from specific exceptions, like when a phishing URL or virus is contained in an email with "spoofed" email address).
As far as I can tell, Gmail can't get this simple thing right, since I keep getting other people's legitimate emails thrown into the spam folder way too often.
http://gmail.com/postmaster ---- The actual relevant link
You clearly have no idea what DMARC is about.
No, DMARC authenticates you as a sender to fight phishing but does not tell you what the rest of the spamfilter concludes. You can still send spam using DMARC. The reporting feedback of DMARC is necessary to find problems in the authentication. An added bonus is that you can identify spammers.
Microsoft has SNDS which is pretty helpful in finding moments when things go bad. It does not identify your customers, I have to find that myself.
nosig today
sed 's/you can identify spammers./you can identify spammers pretending to be you/'
nosig today
well i hope they fix their mail filters first....no matter how many ways i tell gmail amazon isn't spam...thats where it ends up...even mail from the wife does that...which she isn't pleased about
Right, but just based on a quick look at postmaster tools it appears that a big chunk of how it works is sender authentication. That's all I meant.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Train our filters for us.
Valid reasons I mass email our customers: Penis pills for less!
Chance I want that to get through? 100%
"Finally, the spam filter is better than ever at rooting out email impersonation—that nasty source of most phishing scams. Thanks to new machine learning signals, Gmail can now figure out whether a message actually came from its sender, and keep bogus email at bay."
As if that crap didn't false-positive on me way too much already.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
When we keep insisting on filters as the "answer" to spam, we end up with more problems like these as a result. The spammers are continuously changing their strategy to get around filters, which causes this to happen. Unless we approach spam as the economic problem that it is, we won't see this get better.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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DKIM is actually kind of cool. I like to see inbound emails being authenticated by my email server.
DNSSEC was a pain to implement, though. That is, until I found a good, DNSSEC-friendly registrar (gkg.net) that made the switch to DNSSEC for my domain quite easy.
Now I get daily DMARC data sent to me, and also to dmarcian.com for reporting.
Most important, however, is that my emails aren't winding up in spam folders anymore.
Google bought them a few years ago. Postini's approach to solving spam was to look for substantially the same message being sent to some large number of recipients within a window of time, with a "white list" for publishers of legitimate content (suitably vetted). Since GMail sees millions of messages a day, they are in the best position to stop spam at the source by never letting it go to inboxes when there are several incoming, nearly-identical messages (over a few seconds, admittedly, but who sends spam at the rate of one per minute or less?)
I suspect there something else going on here, because I get very little spam via gmail (an sbcglobal.net account, on the other hand, just fills up day after day), so I suspect Postini is still in place...or, perhaps, evolved.
My total volume of spam emails in GMail is very low - only about one/day (32 spam emails in the last 30 days), yet the false positive rate was extremely high and I was missing important messages on a regular basis. I ended up disabling the spam filter (which has to be done by a filter that matches every message) and haven't looked back since.