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

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."

Comments

Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!!

[Rockoon]

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

Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!!

[Iwastheone]

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.

Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Spam from an ad company?! Noooo!!

[Iwastheone]

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.

unsubscribe

[phantomfive]

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

Re:unsubscribe

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

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.

Re:unsubscribe

[phantomfive]

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).

Re:unsubscribe

[ourlovecanlastforeve]

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

Re: unsubscribe

[phantomfive]

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

part of why i hate amazon

[FudRucker]

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

Re:part of why i hate amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:part of why i hate amazon

[Quirkz]

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.

Re:part of why i hate amazon

[taustin]

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.

I'm not alone?

[fustakrakich]

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.

Oh, PROMO emails...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Oh, PROMO emails...

[Falos]

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

not in years

[AndyKron]

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

Re:Yes I want a bigger dong

[mermeid007]

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.

What?

[sexconker]

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?

Re:What?

[mrbester]

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.

Re:What?

[pslytely psycho]

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.

Re:What?

[peakxx]

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

senders adapt..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Google loves spam

[WCMI92]

Especially if they are the spammer.

Re:USE GOOGLE OR DON'T, BUT NO WHINING IF YOU DO

[sexconker]

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.

I didn't used to mind these

[rsilvergun]

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

Fuck email

[Snotnose]

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?