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> A few months after starting I switched from a dedicated Gmail account to Fastmail and it made a profound difference as just receiving and responding to emails

by gkop 11y ago

> A few months after starting I switched from a dedicated Gmail account to Fastmail and it made a profound difference as just receiving and responding to emails was faster by about 10 minutes on each side. Would you elaborate on this point please? 10 minutes?! Each side?!

jquast 11y ago
Presumably greylisting? does gmail do that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
- atmosx 11y ago
  I used OpenBSD's spamd (not to be confused with spam-assasin'g binary). Spamd greylisting is extremely effective but hard to configure properly. It assumes that every SMTPd[1] out there respects the RFC: When a mail is rejected for whatever reason, should be sent again using the prior IP address to get whitelisted. Google and nearly all corps/mail providers switch IP address when they re-send an email. It's probably a measure to circumvent IP-based blocks, but it breaks OpenBSD spamd's implementation. If you're in a hurry or expecting an important email, you're out of luck. It might take 12-24 hours before the mail finally reaches your mailbox, which is simply not acceptable. That said, the amount of spam using spamd fell to nearly 95% on the other hand I had to whitelist manually 81 IP addresses in ~ 6 months.
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
Yeah, this is obviously anecdotal and maybe I was some special case as much of the support was to "new" domains that people were setting up (which is why they needed SSL, etc.) but switching to Fastmail was a huge win as we were close to IM levels of back and forth and there were many occasions where if we intervene early before a customer makes a change it can really help them. I suspect that it's due to Gmail being free that they have an immense amount of anti-spam rules, timeouts and checks to try and keep things reasonable. Since everybody is paying real money to be on Fastmail much of that likely isn't necessary.

by gkop 11y ago

jquast 11y ago

Presumably greylisting? does gmail do that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting

atmosx 11y ago
I used OpenBSD's spamd (not to be confused with spam-assasin'g binary). Spamd greylisting is extremely effective but hard to configure properly. It assumes that every SMTPd[1] out there respects the RFC: When a mail is rejected for whatever reason, should be sent again using the prior IP address to get whitelisted. Google and nearly all corps/mail providers switch IP address when they re-send an email. It's probably a measure to circumvent IP-based blocks, but it breaks OpenBSD spamd's implementation. If you're in a hurry or expecting an important email, you're out of luck. It might take 12-24 hours before the mail finally reaches your mailbox, which is simply not acceptable. That said, the amount of spam using spamd fell to nearly 95% on the other hand I had to whitelist manually 81 IP addresses in ~ 6 months.

michaelbuckbee 11y ago

Yeah, this is obviously anecdotal and maybe I was some special case as much of the support was to "new" domains that people were setting up (which is why they needed SSL, etc.) but switching to Fastmail was a huge win as we were close to IM levels of back and forth and there were many occasions where if we intervene early before a customer makes a change it can really help them. I suspect that it's due to Gmail being free that they have an immense amount of anti-spam rules, timeouts and checks to try and keep things reasonable. Since everybody is paying real money to be on Fastmail much of that likely isn't necessary.