You may have noticed issues with automatic filters and spam scanning in your Gmail inbox over the weekend – these are issues that Google has officially acknowledged and a fix should now be distributed to users.
According to the Google Workspace Status Dashboard (above Engadget) numerous problems affected users of the Google messaging application on Saturday. These issues included “email misclassification” by Gmail’s built-in automatic filtering.
This filtering should place less important emails (like promotions and social media updates) in separate tabs in your main inbox. It’s been around for years and it’s a clever feature, when it works, that you can also edit manually by dragging emails between different tabs.
Because of these “misclassification” issues, you may have noticed that your main inbox tab is more packed with special offers, newsletters, and updates from sites you subscribe to, rather than emails from real people.
Spam and delays
Broken automatic filtering is not the only problem Gmail users face. Google reports that “misclassified spam warnings” were displayed, indicating that the emails were not reviewed for spam content.
You may have seen the message “Gmail did not scan this message for spam, unconfirmed senders, or malware” in some emails, although it’s not clear if the scans actually failed or if the warning message appeared when it shouldn’t have. Additionally, users and Google have reported “delays in receiving emails.”
There’s good news: The issue was marked as “resolved” on Sunday morning, although there appear to be discrepancies in the event logs recorded by Google about how long the issues lasted and when the update was finally rolled out.
Your Gmail inbox should now be back to normal, although Google notes that some warnings for emails sent before the issue was resolved may “still persist.” There is also the promise of an analysis of what went wrong once the internal investigation is complete.
