Gmail users are reporting that their legitimate emails have suddenly started to end up in the spam folder over the last few days.
Thomas Frank, the founder of College Info Geek, tweeted: “All of a sudden, Gmail thinks about half my legit email is spam.”
He later added that based on the replies to his tweet, Gmail’s spam filter “is very broken and is picking up lots of false positives right now.”
Frank advised Gmail users to check their spam folders for legitimate emails and to mark things as “not spam” and “spam” accordingly to “hopefully” fix Gmail’s spam filters.
Tiago Forte, the founder of the productivity website Forte Labs, tweeted that he’d noticed Gmail’s spam filters had become “WAY more strict in the last two weeks” and wrote that he too was finding that “half the emails” in his spam folder weren’t spam.
Forte added that emails from people he messages frequently were being flagged as spam and that emails from a wide variety of senders and domains were being affected by this issue.
In a follow-up tweet, Forte wrote that the spam filter was so strong that “even MY OWN EMAILS TO MYSELF are getting classified as spam.”
“Just checked my spam folder and found all sorts of legit emails in there that I’ve been missing, said Jeff Sheldon, the founder and designer of clothing brand Ugmonk. “Not cool Gmail. There’s got to be a better way.
Media Studies grad student Andy Fischer tweeted that a formal email from the president of his institution containing information about COVID-19 scheduling changes also ended up in Gmail’s spam folder.
https://twitter.com/revandrewwright/status/1238099214963552263
And design engineer Mike Dick wrote that Amazon delivery notifications were being marked as spam in his Gmail.
https://twitter.com/miked1ck/status/1239577754456084482
Gmail appears to be aware of the issue and has replied to Forte and Sheldon via the official Gmail Twitter account.
However, Gmail’s tweets give no indication if or when a fix is coming with the tweets advising both Forte and Sheldon to manually unmark the affected emails as spam and follow Gmail’s existing documentation on dealing with spam.
