Slashdot: Why Google's Gmail Phishing Warnings Give False Positives

Why Google’s Gmail Phishing Warnings Give False Positives
Published on September 30, 2017 at 02:34PM
Vortex.com is one of the oldest domains on the internet — one of the first 40 ever registered, writes Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. So why does Google sometimes block the email he sends?
Here’s why. First, my message had the audacity to mention “Google Account” or “Google Accounts” in the subject and/or body of the message. And secondly, one of my mailing lists is “google-issues” — so some (digest format) recipients received the email from “google-issues-request@vortex.com”… Apparently what we’re dealing with here is a simplistic (and frankly, rather haphazard in this respect at least) string-matching algorithm that could have come right out of the early 1970s…! [A]t least in this case, it appears that Google is basically using the venerable old UNIX/Linux “grep” command or some equivalent, and in a rather slipshod way, too.
In addition, the article concludes, “I’ve never found a way to get Google to ‘whitelist’ well-behaved senders against these kinds of errors, so some users see these false phishing warnings repeatedly.