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Spam on Blast at Work
Sep. 30th, 2025 10:02 amSomething weird is happening with spam and spam filtering at work this week. The volume of spam we're receiving is way up. Whereas I used to see maybe 10 spam messages a day that got through our filters I'm now seeing 50. At the same time a lot of my colleagues are seeing their outgoing messages throttled. Messages are being queued for hours at a time or bounced back to us, undelivered.
The last time I saw a major uptick in incoming spam like this was several years ago, at a different company. And there it was the result of a willful change we'd made. Execs said, "Hmm, spam isn't too bad, deleting 10 a day is manageable, we don't need to pay to renew spam filtering." The very first day after the filtering contract expired we were inundated. Within hours employees from across the company were complaining that email was rendered unusable. And while ICs were contending with several dozen spam messages per day, some senior managers were getting multiple hundreds. Execs restored the budget for spam filtering post-haste.
The situation this week is not due to deliberate change on our side. No exec went the penny wise and pound foolish route of trying to save money on email. Instead, it's a situation that has been thrust upon us.
Google (our email provider) says that we're being throttled because their algorithms see we're the target of a huge uptick in spam. Yeah, we noticed that, too— incoming spam. Why are they treating us like it's our problem? We pay them to fix it; so the fact it's broken is their problem! And why TF are our outgoing emails, legitimate business emails sent by actual people, being throttled? It's like they're punishing us for being victims of their own failing filters.
The last time I saw a major uptick in incoming spam like this was several years ago, at a different company. And there it was the result of a willful change we'd made. Execs said, "Hmm, spam isn't too bad, deleting 10 a day is manageable, we don't need to pay to renew spam filtering." The very first day after the filtering contract expired we were inundated. Within hours employees from across the company were complaining that email was rendered unusable. And while ICs were contending with several dozen spam messages per day, some senior managers were getting multiple hundreds. Execs restored the budget for spam filtering post-haste.
The situation this week is not due to deliberate change on our side. No exec went the penny wise and pound foolish route of trying to save money on email. Instead, it's a situation that has been thrust upon us.
Google (our email provider) says that we're being throttled because their algorithms see we're the target of a huge uptick in spam. Yeah, we noticed that, too— incoming spam. Why are they treating us like it's our problem? We pay them to fix it; so the fact it's broken is their problem! And why TF are our outgoing emails, legitimate business emails sent by actual people, being throttled? It's like they're punishing us for being victims of their own failing filters.
