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If Your Gmail Inbox Is Being Flooded With Promo Emails, You're Not Alone (buzzfeednews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the stranger-things dept.

Gmail users are reporting that promotional emails (meant to showcase deals, offers, and other marketing emails) from companies are ending up in their main "Primary" inbox (meant for person-to-person conversations and messages that don't appear in other tabs.). The company says it is working on a fix. From a report: Google told BuzzFeed News it's working on a fix, but it did not specify when users should expect inboxes to go back to normal. In a statement, a spokesperson said, "We are aware of an issue in Gmail causing certain promotional email to be incorrectly categorized. We are rolling out a fix shortly."

49 comments

  1. Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If your mailbox is full of ads, maybe you shouldn't have an ad company run your mailserver.

    1. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is referring to the free personal email; corporate gmail versions don't have this issue. Also, these emails were never getting moved to spam folder; gmail has 3 tabs by default to auto sort email, so most stuff goes in primary, social media alerts (e.g. Facebook) in the Social Media folder, and promotions of any kind (presumably ones users want or accidentally signed up for but are otherwise from legitimate companies) go in the Promotions folder. Due to this issue the promotions are being misfiled. Doesn't seem clear if this is a google issue, or are advertisers finding ways to work around the auto sort and get themselves in the primary folder?

    2. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm always alone.

    3. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hah my first thought was that Google is doing A/B testing.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    4. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're definitely a B, so that makes sense.

    5. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Iwastheone · · Score: 1
      I use gmail for my personal main email, rarely do I get spam in my primary, spam mail is most always sent to the spam box. Only use that account for when a reputable site requires it, else a throwaway hotmail account gets used.

      I follow the advice of the father of email, Ray Tomlinson (R.I.P., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). If I do not recognize the sender I delete it without clicking on it.

      I had my spam box whittled down to no spam until I signed up for home internet with Cablevision, then the spam started up, mostly "Click here to unsubscribe" or "(Email Name), stop sending me your pics" with a female name as the sender. Hovering over the sender shows some address that I'm not familiar with, and does not get opened, I'll just delete all spam, done. Now, after a few months, I rarely get spam.

    6. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 1

      Only use that account for when a reputable site requires it, else a throwaway hotmail account gets used

      Funny, I use my Gmail account for the very thing you use your Hotmail account: if it's trash or stuff required by Google - which is the same thing - then I submit the ole Gmail account. My real email is handled by a reputable ISP.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    7. Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!! by Iwastheone · · Score: 1

      As a simple computer user, the worst I do is 'google' nude images of women celebs. I assume that nothing done on a computer/phone is secure, there always seems to be a backdoor or 12 somehow anyway. I know, google is an NSA creation. Since I live a simple life, computing and other wise, and have more private matters to concern myself with in my life that consume my time, it doesn't really concern me. I'm the product of free gmail. I pay no attention to the ads that do get through my adblockers.

  2. "Congratulations, you've been selected as new AG!" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Congratulations American citizen, you've been pre-selected to become the next acting Attorney General of the United States! YOU MAY ALREADY BE RECUSED!

  3. unsubscribe by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Unsubscribe doesn't work for spam, but for company promos, just unsubscribe. There's no reason to keep that stuff around

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:unsubscribe by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 1

      Hello, former customer service / tech support agent for a company that provided spam mailing software.

      You should know that most spammers and people responsible for managing marketing emails for corporations use the unsubscribe link to verify your email address is valid.

      Corporate newsletters are not managed by an employee of the company they are ostensibly sent from.

      They are managed by third parties who specialize in dodging spam filters.

      If you clicked the unsubscribe link it means you have a valid email address, so yes, they'll remove you from that mailing list.

      But every day they take the list of unsubscribed addresses and dump them straight into five other mailing lists.

      Then when they're done with their campaign they sell all the addresses of people who clicked unsubscribe to overseas spammers.

      Other shitty things corporate email managers do:
      * A lot of the time that unsubscribe link just goes to a static page that says you've been unsubscribed. You're not really unsubscribed.
      * Frequently they intentionally break the database that contains the list of unsubscribed users so the addresses can't be stored for later removal. They'll call customer service to have them repair the database when their boss complains but then as soon as they hang up the phone they'll run a script that breaks it again. I personally witnessed this on multiple occasions when the customer forgot to close the remote support screen share after hanging up the phone.
      * They will put in a unsubscribe link to their newsletters but they'll make the text of the link and the background of the table cell the same color.
      *They'll intentionally break the unsubscribe link so it doesn't work.
      * If you unsubscribe too many times they'll dump your email address into porn mailing lists out of spite. Once you're on a few porn mailing lists it's basically impossible to ever stop getting porn spam because each list you're added to results in your address being added to five more.

    2. Re:unsubscribe by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      people responsible for managing marketing emails for corporations use the unsubscribe link to verify your email address is valid.

      They used to, but if marketers do this, gmail starts routing all their stuff into the spam folder. So legitimate companies don't do that anymore (spammers don't care).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:unsubscribe by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 1

      Sure they do, they just rotate to a new set of IP addresses.

    4. Re: unsubscribe by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      That won't get through a spam filter at all.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. part of why i hate amazon by FudRucker · · Score: 2

    they use the privilege that i buy products from/through them to spam my inbox with promotional spam, the only mail i want to see from amazon is a confirmation of a purchase and then a product shipped with a tracking number, anything more than that is spam

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
    1. Re:part of why i hate amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Amazon never sent me spam or any other email that is not related to my purchase. Maybe you should check your mail preferences? I use Amazon for number of years and had prime membership for at least 3.

    2. Re:part of why i hate amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Amazon never sent me spam or any other email that is not related to my purchase.

      I'm with FudRucker in wanting and expecting only an order confirmation and a ship notice from Amazon. Unfortunately, Amazon periodically follows up purchases with "hey, you bought whatever_product; do you think you could answer this stupid question someone has about it?" emails. (They don't actually point out that the question is stupid, but it invariably is.) They must also bless third parties with my address, because I'll also periodically receive "give us a good rating!" emails before I actually receive the thing I ordered. (Hint to sellers: you're not going to get a good rating if you're nagging me before I receive the damned thing. Be glad my reply to those is silence.)

      So to your point: yeah, technically the extra emails are related to my purchases, but they are ancillary to the order, not actually contributing anything to the process.

    3. Re:part of why i hate amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Better than Walmart. One email for order confirmation. One email for every item shipped. One email for every item delievered. WTF!? Oh, also, their delivery estimates are utter shit. Amazon at least has been incredibly consistent, only being late by a day on very rare occasions--without Prime they used to actually regularly deliver earlier than estimate, but Amazon seemingly changed their algorithm to stop that sort of non-Prime advantage.

    4. Re:part of why i hate amazon by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      I'm in between the two stated experiences.

      - I never get promotional spam. Only order-related info.

      - However, for third-party sellers, the email setting is all or nothing. Either they can hit you up 3-5 times for every single order, including begging for reviews, or they're not allowed to talk to you at all, not even for canceled or other completely failed orders. This doesn't make much sense, and I wish there was more granularity. I eventually got so fed up I turned it off. If a package ever fails somehow I'll have to remember to turn this back on in order to talk to the third party. But I can live with that better than the alternative.

      --
      The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
    5. Re:part of why i hate amazon by taustin · · Score: 1

      All I ever do see is order and shipping confirmations, and the occasional question about a specific product from someone considering buying it (and I'm pretty sure I could opt out of those, too).

      Yeah, it should be the default, but you can get rid of their crap. If you're smart.

  5. I'm not alone? by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

    Funny, I'm the only one in the room...

    Until we learn how to make the internet peer to peer, there will be no 'privacy'. I don't know why that's so difficult to understand and/or accept.

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    1. Re:I'm not alone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Eternal September obliterated any hope of that.

      The teeming masses love very few things more than service centralization and corporate data-mining.

  6. Oh, PROMO emails... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Sorry, read that wrong. Nope, none of those here.

    1. Re:Oh, PROMO emails... by Falos · · Score: 1

      The ones that say "BIGGER WANG 2FAST2DAY" double as Promo.

  7. not in years by AndyKron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I han't checked my gmail in years. Probably best I keep it that way.

  8. Re:Yes I want a bigger dong by mermeid007 · · Score: 1

    I get spam for news, spam for movies, spam for TV, spam for exercise products, spam for books, spam for tech gadgets, spam for all kinds of things. A lot of the promos are not so bad. I did get a nice DVD of Mulholland Drive once.

  9. What? by sexconker · · Score: 1

    What is Gmail doing where messages that are not Spam and are not otherwise filtered by the users are expected to go somewhere other than the Inbox??

    Do they give you multiple Inboxes now? Why the fuck would anyone want to have to check multiple Inboxes they have no control over?
    If I want to filter shit, I filter shit. Who the hell lets Google decide what's what beyond spam?

    1. Re:What? by mrbester · · Score: 1

      If you've not set it back to how it originally was before they mucked around with it, you'd have some tabs: Primary, Promotions and Social (I think. First day I saw that I reverted it). Google decided that it would take on the job of sorting email into categories so you wouldn't have to bother. I guess for the most part users didn't care much as their Gmail address was their only point of contact, and it worked pretty well, but I'd already got rules and filters to categorise long before they decided to do this.

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
    2. Re: What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have a default action when a company tells me 'we have a new feature would you like to try it?' I always say no. Therefore I have never experienced this multiple inbox shit.

    3. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do they give you multiple Inboxes now? Why the fuck would anyone want to have to check multiple Inboxes they have no control over?

      It's one inbox. Google just tries to help you reduce the clutter by virtually grouping it based on filter criteria. By default, they try to distinguish promotional emails from actual message exchanges, so the unwanted ads you're receiving because you bought some thing or notifications of an upgraded version of software title X aren't mixed in with emails from your SO, kids, friends, etc.

    4. Re:What? by pslytely+psycho · · Score: 1

      I actually found it useful, basically for the opposite reasons you didn't. I set filters, and that was it. So it's always been a jumble I didn't care enough about to sort. Now my two Youtube subscriptions of LTT and Scott Manley show up in Social, AAA, other insurance and payroll show up in the promo tab and the rest (I don't use the forum tab) show up in the main tab. It actually cleaned up my messy mailbox.

      Email is not primary to my work, so it's always been very low priority for me.

      Today however I did have two ads each in the social an promo. First time ever. To GMails credit they are all marked 'AD' but should of been filtered.

      --
      Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
    5. Re:What? by peakxx · · Score: 1

      Totally agree, zero inbox rule gets blurry if you use tabs: http://mhariri.info/posts/gmai...

  10. Virginmedia by pigsycyberbully · · Score: 0

    I run my own e-mail and if I do not like it I block it. Strangely my postmaster inbox receives fake job listings often with micro-viruses attached usually coming from a "Godaddy" domain e-mail account. My broadband connection in the U.K. is supplied by a company going under the name of virginmedia and their e-mail system is provided by Google Gmail. virginmedia is notoriously bad all their staff are in India who speak some kind of English called gibberish.

    1. Re: Virginmedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cool story bro...

    2. Re: Virginmedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nope. Virgin media brought email in house in 2015 when Google withdrew Gmail for ISP support. UK virgin media user.

  11. USE GOOGLE OR DON'T, BUT NO WHINING IF YOU DO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SEXLESS CLUNKER LOVES TO WHINE, news at 11. If you don't like it, DO NOT USE IT. "doctor it hurts when I do this!" "Get out of my office you retard."

    1. Re:USE GOOGLE OR DON'T, BUT NO WHINING IF YOU DO by sexconker · · Score: 1

      SEXLESS CLUNKER LOVES TO WHINE, news at 11. If you don't like it, DO NOT USE IT. "doctor it hurts when I do this!" "Get out of my office you retard."

      I typically DON'T use Gmail.

    2. Re:USE GOOGLE OR DON'T, BUT NO WHINING IF YOU DO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SO STOP WHINING! Go outside! Run around! "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE YOU RETARD!"

  12. senders adapt.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    imagine that. google implements default filters and sorting and along comes email advertisers who figure that shit out so their junk email gets sorted like personal emails from family and friends.

  13. Google loves spam by WCMI92 · · Score: 1

    Especially if they are the spammer.

    --
    Corporatism != Free Market
  14. Don't really get this problem using Inbox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Since I've been using Google's own Inbox mail app for the last couple of years, which categorizes email quite effectively, I haven't had this kind of problem. Promotional email and other light spam tends to just all end up in the "Promotions" category, and I can just click 'done' on the entire category to get rid of them all at once.

    Of course, Google are shutting down inbox and forcing us to all use Gmail, which does not have auto-categorization or a nice way of marking email done so that they no longer show up in your main inbox. Not sure why they decided to close Inbox, since it was far better than Gmail from my experience, but Google seems to like shuttering services lots of people like and replacing them with new ones. In this case, we are just being told to use Gmail, but I don't doubt Google will invent some other new service that's also inferior to Inbox in a few months time.

  15. Working as intended by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My gmail inbox probably IS full of spam - it's a disposable spam trap and working as I intended.

    Ironical captcha - encrypt

  16. or.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Laugh because you ditched gmail

  17. I didn't used to mind these by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    because the deals were actually pretty good, but lately they're the same prices I can get any old time of the week.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  18. Fuck email by Snotnose · · Score: 1

    I'm getting SMS bombed. Twice a day my phone wakes up with some ad I don't want to see.

    What changed, and how do I fix it?

  19. not a bug by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... its a feature!

  20. From Viagra ads in my Inbox... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To Viagra ads on my TV (broadcast DTV) during the 6:00 PM news. Only in Amurica.

  21. The Big Ones hate email by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It can't be monetized, as Facebook, WhatsApp, (the now defunct) Google+ or all those other "silos" meant to substitute, enhance or steroidize mail.

    So expect any mail "service" (I'd call it rather "disservice") by one of the Big Ones to degrade slowly in the course of the next years. That's BTW the same pattern you can observe in BigCos: Microsoft going around and trying to kill mail with their Office 365. Their Wormtongues tell management "Sssshhhh! Mail is old...."

    If you are a "customer" (aka ware) of one of those: it's time to CHANGE MAIL PROVIDER NOW.