Hello,

I have bought a game on GOG, after which a order confirmation mail was sent (subject: Your order #XX is complete!). However, this mail was evaluated by Gmail as dangerous/phishing mail because of a link it supposedly contains and was automatically put to SPAM. So far, Gmail phishing analysis was pretty precise and I don't recall any false positives happened to me before. I have also bought some other games in past using GOG and no problems.

I am now wondering whether it is safe to download the game (Galador - The Prince and the Coward)

What specific information might have made this mail to be evaluated as dangerous? Is it common occurrence for others as well?

Thank you

Yes, this is known for a while now.

But no one knows why exactly. Google says there are dangerous links in the mail, but all of them just lead to standard sites on GOG.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_receipt_marked_as_spam_in_gmail_for_containing_dangerous_links


Edit: Also two factor authentification mails goes to spam, but newsletters or discountcodes don't.

It comes and goes. Sometimes they are handled normally and a few days later they are marked as spam again.

False positives are Google's problem, not GOG.

Maybe you should switch to an alternative email provider.

its probably people who don't know how to unsubscribe from GOG's Newsletter so they mark GOG emails as spam or pishing and eventually the service will filter it to there, but you can mark it as safe on your end.

Ok, got it, so it's a common problem. Was just scared whether it is something wrong with this particular game. It's unfortunate that Google does not give any specific info what exactly is wrong with the e-mail

Nothing. All of the major email service providers have algorithms built in so that when enough people report something as spam/phishing, then they'll be auto-flagged in everyone else's inboxes accordingly. Also applies when the contents of the email contains spam and other malicious links.

GOG should be doing whatever they can to get whitelisted by following the email standards set out by Google Gmail and Postmaster - https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?sjid=17830239755456658353-NC

Or when their websites contain spam that doesn't get contained for a week or longer.
And in the case of Gmail, I imagine there's also "Detected spamlike behavior"; the nature of those obnoxious newsletters.

Funny enough, newsletters don't get auto-marked as spam, only purchase confirmations and two factor authentification.

According to Google, the reason for the flag is that these mails contain dangerous links. I checked all links and they are very generic, no user ID or anything is used.



Edit: JFI, The purchase I made today didn't end up in spam.
But don't get your hopes up yet.

that's odd because recently ALL emails for GOG where in my spam I had to manually clear and send reports to Google about it.

I think we can agree, that there's something fishy going on :)

In any case we users should not have to deal with this. Some time ago some GOG guys said that they were trying to contact Google, but it's not easy to actually get a human being on the phone.