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Having spam and filtering issues in Gmail? You're not alone – and Google is rolling out a fix

2026-01-25 15:30
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Having spam and filtering issues in Gmail? You're not alone – and Google is rolling out a fix

A variety of bugs have been afflicting Gmail inboxes over the course of the weekend, but Google seems to be on top of it.

  1. Computing
  2. Internet
  3. Email & Messaging
Having spam and filtering issues in Gmail? You're not alone – and Google is rolling out a fix News By David Nield published 25 January 2026

Gmail is getting back to normal

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  • A variety of Gmail bugs have been acknowledged by Google
  • They cover automatic filtering, spam, and delivery delays
  • The Gmail app should now be getting back to normal for users

You may well have noticed issues with the 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 making its way out to users.

As per the Google Workspace Status Dashboard (via Engadget), numerous issues affected users of Google's email app across the course of Saturday. These issues included "misclassification of emails" via Gmail's built-in automatic filtering.

That filtering should put less important emails (such as promotions and social media updates) into separate tabs away from your main inbox. It's been in place for years, and is a clever feature – when it works – that you can also tweak manually by dragging emails between different tabs.

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With these "misclassification" problems, you may well have seen your Primary inbox tab somewhat overrun with special deals, newsletters, and updates from sites you're signed up to, rather than emails from actual people.

Spam and delays

Spam messages

Spam messages have been affected too (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Broken automatic filtering hasn't been the only issue that Gmail users have been struggling with. Google reports that "misclassified spam warnings" were cropping up, indicating that emails hadn't been checked for spam content.

You may have seen a "Gmail hasn't scanned this message for spam, unverified senders, or harmful software" message on some emails – though it's not clear whether the scans were actually failing, or the warning message was showing up when it shouldn't have been. On top of that, "delays in receiving email" have been reported by users and by Google.

There is some good news: the issue was marked as "resolved" by Sunday morning, though there seem to be some discrepancies in Google's own recorded logs of events as to how long the problems persisted for and when the fix finally rolled out.

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Your Gmail inbox should now be back to normal, though Google notes that some warnings "may persist" for emails sent before the problem was resolved. There's also the promise of an analysis of what went wrong, once an internal investigation has been completed.

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TOPICS Gmail Google David NieldDavid NieldSocial Links NavigationFreelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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