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How to I disable spam for my emails?

Why do a lot of university emails get labeled as spam by Gmail?

  • I am a senior who's applying to colleges. Generally my Gmail account gets spam correctly and I haven't had any problems with fishing out important messages from the spam folder (meaning, I very rarely had to do that ever). But, ever since I applied for admission, a LOT of the emails were sent directly to spam - including important emails that were about interviews, PIN codes for checking admission status, and general notices of missing material. So far I've only had MIT (MIT alumni interview), Harvard (PIN code, alumni interview), and Cornell (alumni interview, which is weird as I have talked with the guy with the same address the night before...) be sent directly to spam. Why does this happen? All of the emails were sent from .edu addresses, which is odd for Gmail to mark them as spam.

  • Answer:

    I may be going out on a limb here, but I have a feeling it's because of historical user feedback to college emails and its effect on Gmail's "self-learning" spam filter. Many high school students make the mistake of putting down their email on Collegboard tests and the like (I know I did), and the influx of emails from colleges gets so overwhelming that many mark the brunt of the emails as spam (as I did for some time). This probably led Gmail to universally deposit a lot of college related content to the spam folder, leading to problems similar to what you've outlined. Disclaimer: this is all just a hunch, so don't be surprised if I'm completely wrong about the issue.

Anay Katyal at Quora Visit the source

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I've been noticing the past few months more and more legitimate emails going to spam with gmail. I think it's because of a few reasons, not all of which are perfect but help them filter what they think are junk emails. Gmail looks for certain words/phrases in emails and will sometimes automatically toss it into spam if it see them. Gmail now requires senders to use SMTP. I ran across this problem for a few sites who's contact forms I set up years ago. All of the emails from the form were being sent to spam because we didn't have an authentic SMTP server sending the messages. I think rather than deleting many people click on the spam button to delete messages. I'm assuming if the percentage gets high enough Gmail might think all messages coming from the sender are spam and sends them to the spam folder for everyone. There are probably other factors I'm not aware of. One thing you can do if you find a message in your spam folder which isn't is to click the "Filter message like these" from the dropdown and choose "Never mark as spam" option. Also click the "Not Spam" button. For .edu messages you could create a filter that look for messages sent from .edu domains and also tell them to 'never mark to spam'.

David Ross

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