Gmail's Spam Filters Are Failing - And Telling You to 'Be Careful'

Your inbox just turned into a minefield: Gmail's spam filters are letting promotional emails through unscanned, with a cryptic warning banner to boot.

Gmail users have reported promotional emails bypassing spam filters and appearing directly in main inboxes. Affected messages display a warning banner: 'Be careful with this message. Gmail hasn’t scanned this message for spam, unverified senders, or harmful software.'

Google officially acknowledged the issue via its Workspace Status Dashboard at 2026-01-24 05:02 PST. The status update read:

We are experiencing an issue with Gmail beginning on Saturday, 2026-01-24 05:02 US/Pacific... Our engineering team is investigating the issue

The company pledged to provide an update by 2026-01-24 09:30 PST. Concurrently, user reports about the anomaly have surfaced on Google forums and Reddit, describing the inconsistent filtering behavior.