If you have been having some major problems with your Gmail app, you are not alone. Over the weekend, the internationally popular email service from Google was experiencing several bugs that affected the app’s automatic filters. This meant scores of users have reportedly seen their inboxes alarmingly full with everything from the usually filtered promotional emails to unwanted spam that isn’t usually seen.

Gmail is set up to automatically send junk mail directly into the app’s ‘spam’ folder. If you didn’t know this existed, that’s a good thing – Google is doing its job and filtering all the spam emails sent your way into a folder that automatically empties every 30 days. If your email address has ended up on a list somewhere, Gmail makes sure you aren’t receiving tons of rubbish.

The app also filters promotional emails from newsletter lists you are signed up to and other emails from social accounts into different folders to keep your inbox as tidy as possible.

But at the weekend, as spotted by Engadget, Google listed a known issue on its Google Workspace Status Dashboard late Saturday, which affected Gmail users worldwide, causing some big issues with Gmail’s filtering function:

“We are aware that some Gmail users are experiencing misclassification of emails in their inbox and additional spam warnings,” Google said. “We are actively working to resolve the issue. As always, we encourage users to follow standard best practices when engaging with messages from unknown senders.”

It then took several hours for the email problem to be sorted.

“I thought my email was weird, my email is suddenly getting hundreds of emails that would usually go to spam. It’s making me miss more important emails,” one disgruntled Gmail user posted on X.

Given millions of people around the world rely on Gmail, a free email service, when there are issues it’s always very noticeable. Thankfully, Google says it is rolling out a fix, which means if your inbox was suddenly bursting at the seams with spam and unwanted messages, things should now be returning to normal.

“Update: this issue is now fully resolved for all users – thank you for your patience,” Google posted on X via the official Gmail account at 2:07am UK time on Sunday, January 25.

“Some Gmail users experienced a misclassification of emails in their inbox, additional spam warnings, and delays in receiving email,” Google said on its status dashboard.

“Additionally, misclassified spam warnings from the incident may persist for existing messages received before the issue resolution.”

This means that though the problem is fixed, you might see some odd activity in your inbox, and messages that are totally safe from known senders could still be flagged as spam, even though they aren’t.

It means it’ll be a good idea to comb through all the emails you received this weekend if you think you have been affected, in case you have missed any important emails as a result of the bugs.