Re: Heads up: GMail regularly marking list messages as spam

From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Date: Aug 12, 2024, 16:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20240812-devout-mindful-dogfish-81cefa@lemur>
In-Reply-To: <CA+t9iMyT8fAR_fvQXOer=ivLnNKDnH8g_M8iQiq7gdrnfG7aCg@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 08:10:23AM GMT, Mike Castle wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> If you read the list via GMail, you may want to regularly check your
> Spam label for messages from the git list.
> 
> I'm not sure what's up with that.  A handful of real spam had made it
> through vger, but GMail seems to be hitting a fair number of false
> positives lately.

Gmail is using internal spam training on all mail that it receives. Unfortunately, mailing list traffic like that on the git list falls way outside what is "normal," and this tends to trigger false-positives.

> Sometimes it is just one message in a patch set.  Others, it is whole
> sets of patches.  I didn't check to see if there was anything in
> common across the messages.  Maybe if anyone has a large batch, they
> can check?

Most of the time it's super unhelpful:

    Why is this message in spam?

    It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past.

Sometimes it's something specific:

    Why is this message in spam?

    Lots of messages from xxxxx.msg.chrl.nc.charter.net were identified as
    spam in the past.

This isn't really anything to do with vger.kernel.org -- we are complying with all Gmail "bulk mail sender" requirements and we try our best to deny spammers early. Unfortunately, my general recommendation is not to use Gmail for this kind of work.

-K