I regularly (more than once a week) receive obvious spam direct into my Gmail inbox. It looks like:
Hello, handsome man, I would be very happy to meet a man like you and have a coffee with you to make each other happy.
The ‘from’ address usually contains ’love’, ‘sweet’ or even ‘sexy’, such as ’lovesakina33@gmail.com’.
I generally think gmail’s spam detection is pretty decent, other than these obvious attempts to scam lonely single men I don’t get much other spam directly in the Inbox, and if I dare to look in the spam folder it contains mostly stuff that yes I didn’t need to see.
So why can’t gmail figure out that these are spam? Especially when presumably the end game here is some scam, so it’s worse than just spam.
Not only is the spam coming into gmail but it’s originating from a gmail account. Why can gmail not detect these accounts and shut them down? That doesn’t seem technically infeasible, or even that difficult. But I’m also curious just why the spam filter isn’t catching these. I’m religiously marking them as spam and reporting them as I assume many other people are. So what trick have these scammers pulled in order to evade the spam filter and how hasn’t that trick been discovered and defended against?
I’m genuinely curious about this.
A few weeks ago I linked to an excellent post asking Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up. A fix for this spam detection issue would not at all be shovelware, but is it not somewhat bearish for A.I. coding that no one at Google has been able to get Gemini to work out a fix for this? I understand that spam detection is an on-going arms race, but these flirtatious scam messages haven’t changed in years.