Ask HN: Anyone else have long-standing GMail filters that have stopped working?
Some filters I've had working in Gmail for years seem to have intermittently stopped working over the last year or so. I'll have a filter with a simple subject line match, and now I'm getting these messages in my Inbox, when they should be bypassing it.
Haven't been able to discern any pattern to this yet, but I haven't really dug into it. I wonder why the regression? Is this some kind of throttling? Like approximate matching?
I have noticed that occassionally the filters seem to run on a delay...I have filters to bypass the inbox and apply a label. I will see the email in the inbox for up to an hour before the filter runs and then later I see the label applied and the email is no longer in the inbox.
I've noticed the same on Spam filtering as well. It used to be instant but now more and more I see things show up for a few minutes before disappearing. I also just recently set up a new gmail account that required some filtering to a sizeable inbox and it was very painful because of the delays.
This is what you call eventual consistency.
Any conspiracy theories as to why that is?
Considering the effort that goes into Google products (not to mention that gmail is a core product), it seems strange that in 2019 a feature like this is noticeably delayed.
I had all my filters stop working about 5 or 6 months ago. I had to remove them all. New ones made exactly the same worked fine, but since I don't trust them now, I don't have any filters any more.
No idea how it broke, but I guess it's a matter of software upgrades without the requisite data migration. Google's data composition is very complex so I can see this happening from time to time.