Google Suspicious Link Warnings

A number of folks in the sender space are reporting intermittent “This link may be suspicious” warnings on their emails. I first heard about it a few weeks ago from some clients. One wasn’t sure what was going on, the other found a bunch of malware uploaded into their customer accounts.

At least 3 people have mentioned it today. One of them asked on Mailop, and the couple Google employees over there are generally pretty helpful when issues like this come up.

What we currently know:

  • Multiple senders are seeing warnings;
  • The warnings are intermittent and not reproducible;
  • They’re affecting lots of links, including some ESP click domains.

From the outside, it looks like Google is being overly aggressive with their suspicious link detector and are generating a significant number of false positives. This is something they’ve got to fix. I’ll update when I know something.

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