Did Google just sell my private Google email address or was a reputed vendor website very clever?

Affirmative! I have prove for it now! I was just stunned to receive an email from the publisher Simon & Schuster inviting me to claim a free Ebook (see screenshot below). I have had no dealings/interactions whatsoever with Simon & Schuster in the past.

Today, I visited the Simon & Schuster website very briefly to quickly check out one book that I intended to blog about (see my blog post here) in order to copy the book cover. At most I spent 1-2 minutes on the webpage of this book. I don't think, I gave this publisher my consent to have my email address. I do remember, a popup was perhaps showing up and I clicked out of it as usual.

What is really strange, I have two different active Gmail email addresses. One that is associated with this blog and one for my private email. I visited the publishers website being logged into the Chrome browser with my Blogger account which is attached to my blog email address, but the email from the publisher was sent to my private email account

P.S. This kind of surprise does not happen very often by Google Gmail. It happens very rarely.

No harm was done, but still!

For several days now, the Google Gmail spam blocker seems to fail

Update: Today, I have already received two spam emails in my inbox and only 14 hours of the day have passed.

About every day now I receive one or more obviously suspicious emails with an attachment in my inbox.

The Gmail spam filter used to be very good until recently. I wonder what happened!

I am even a paying subscription customer of Google!

Here is the latest spam email

Google identifies Google Scholar as an email spammer in Gmail

What a great joke! Was AI hallucinating again? 😊

Today, this message was in my Gmail spam folder. I get about a dozen or more of similar messages per day from Google Scholar, because I follow certain scholars like Kyunghyun Cho. By the way, Kyunghyun Cho is a top ML & AI researcher with over 160,000 lifetime citations.

I don't remember ever having seen this happening before that a Google Scholar alert email about new research papers by a scholar that I follow ends up in the Gmail spam folder.

Python for Google Gmail annoyances

Very recently, I tried to manage my emails using Python and Google Cloud APIs. My IDE is Visual Studio Code.

I readily admit that I am not an expert software developer, but I have programmed on a large number of different projects in at least half a dozen different languages over many years. None of these projects were very large and complex. 

However, for some odd reason Google made it extremely and unnecessarily complicated to do this. The Google provided examples, tutorials and error messages were not very helpful. I had to give up after several days and many hours of intense trial and error.

Compare that to the JavaScript GmailApp library provided for Google Apps Script. I have previously and successfully used this library to manage my emails in Gmail through Google Sheets. Unfortunately, there is nothing comparable to the GmailApp available for Python from Google! Very regrettable since Python has become such a popular programming language in recent years not least thanks to machine learning & AI!

What I do now is to dump certain email messages as a simple text file (MBox file) using Google Takeout. Next I use Python to parse the email messages etc.

P.S. About Google Takeout I could write another annoyances blog post (e.g. it dumps also all trashed emails associated with a custom label). Generally speaking, Google Takeout is very primitive! Why was a bulk email dumping feature not integrated into Gmail in the first place!!!! Grrr!

Latest Google Gmail annoyances

I noticed in recent weeks my spam folder gets cluttered with more regular emails that are definitely not spam. Many of these emails I have been receiving from the same senders for months if not years.

First, I tried to undo the spam designation several times over, but Gmail continued to direct those emails to spam.

As a countermeasure, I then defined filters that those senders are to be sent to my inbox. Gmail responded by now attaching following annoying message at the top of each of those filtered emails in my inbox.

The Report not spam functionality is phony and not working as expected! I clicked on it already several times. 

Gmail spam filter has become very annoying lately!

For several weeks now, I have to frequently monitor my spam folder, because the Google spam filter has become very biased to use a popular and politically correct AI tech term!

At first, I thought this was perhaps a temporary aberration or something went awry with their algorithms. However, Google would not fix it! After at least two months or so, I have to presume this new spam filter is intentional!

Even emails from senders that I have been receiving for years end up now in my spam folder. Not only that, I have repeatedly reported these senders as not spam, but my flagging is being ignored by Google!

Google definitely targets e.g. The Epoch Times, which vehemently opposes the Communist Party of China! Is Google possibly a fellow traveler of the CPC? 

Until recently, the Google spam filter was working as expected! Only a few  and correctly identified emails would end in the spam folder over extended periods of time!

It is very annoying!!!! I am quite unhappy about this!!!!