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My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messa
by rfrey 10y ago
My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter.
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
- exhilaration 10y agoIt's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
- arm 10y agoIt’s the top comment right now because it was only posted 5 minutes ago.
- 0xmohit 10y agoYes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
- Diederich 10y agoYup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
- rdtsc 10y agoYap, I noticed a few valid messages there recently. Marked them as "Not Spam" but it was a bit worrying.
- josephb 10y agoDue to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\
- patates 10y agoI still think about it when it (albeit VERY rarely) marks legitimate emails as spam.
- swah 10y agoThe spam folder is the only place I can find email personally addressed to me these days. (Always from that nigerian royal member, unfortunatelly...)
- wcunning 10y agoGMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.
- robbiemitchell 10y agoInstantly deleted it? That doesn't sound right for the spam folder.
- ClashTheBunny 10y agoThere is a threshold for spammyness that will cause email to be dropped silently and never reach the spam folder.
- robbiemitchell 10y agoI'm skeptical this is true. Is there any documentation or other evidence for this?
- devopsproject 10y agohttps://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/Apps/l-TmEzzFme4 https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/Apps/l-TmEzzF...
- robbiemitchell 10y agoI read that forum rant and the linked content, and there is still no evidence that Gmail is deleting emails immediately by default. I read two possible causes: - Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox - Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail? Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?
- jeffmould 10y agoActually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.
- scholia 10y agoI have the same problem. At one time, more than half the Gmail spambox was legitimate email, so I had to check it every day. (It was so bad, I kept screen grabs as evidence.) This year, things got much better for a few months, and now they are getting worse again....
- jeffmould 10y agoThe middle of last year is when it started for me. It only affects my personal Gmail account, though. My Google for Business account seems to work fine, and I get a lot more mail there. I can't imagine they use two different filters, but it seems to almost be the case. Either that or there is a bug in one platform with the Not Spam button not working properly.
- jrnichols 10y agoI definitely had this problem. I moved from a metal server to a VPS which had a different IP address, and it's taken probably 3 months to finally have a decent enough email reputation so that Gmail isn't automatically dumping email into spam. And you have to drill down to even get to that Spam folder too. It was at the point where I really couldn't effectively communicate with anyone on gmail because of that. The answer I kept getting was "Well, why don't you just use Gmail instead of your own email stuff?" It's kind of scary to me sometimes just how well Google has managed to get people to equate email with Gmail.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- RachelF 10y agoI have the same problem. A few emails a week get classified as spam by gmail, when they should not. I guess many users don't complain about it as they never look in their gmail spam folders and see emails that they should have received.
- doh 10y agoGmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder. The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was. The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.
- chmars 10y agoI use many filters to deal with legitimate incoming mail – and I usually set the 'Never send it to Spam' tag. That has helped a lot!
- syntheticnature 10y agoI, too, have run into this. One email setup was moved to Google Apps, and it flagged JIRA email as spam. Once that was fixed, I figured I was good, but more recently it flagged a document share request... from Google Docs... originating from within the same organization (i.e. same Google Apps account). Left hand, meet right hand.
- chmars 10y agoIt pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
- dboreham 10y agoThe challenge with spam filtering isn't in stopping all spam, but rather with nother filtering that one random email that turns out to lead to a life-changing opportunity..
- 0xmohit 10y agoIs their spam filter deliberately design to be too conservative?
- JohnTHaller 10y agoIt's a similar thing on Rackspace's email. Their spam filter never learns anything. Marking something as "Not Spam" just adds a whitelisting rule for that sender for that particular email account. You can bypass all of Rackspace's email filters simply by UTF8 encoding the from address and subject. Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.
- thomasfoster96 10y agoI had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.
- Titanous 10y agoThe spam threshold is adjustable: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html#settings https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html#settings It also supports training a filter on your specific email/spam patterns which works very well in my experience.
- Accacin 10y agoI had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much). Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.
- vocatus_gate 10y agoSerious question - why would you pay for email when there's plenty of good free providers? (Gmail, Yahoo, etc)
- nightski 10y agoBecause they aren't free, there is always a cost. Not only that, a single Gmail tab can take up 350-500 mb RAM. Lastly, getting Gmail on a custom domain is not "free" anymore.
- Dobbs 10y agoNot OP but a fellow fastmail user. Now a days there aren't actually good free providers. Google charges a yearly fee if you want to use a custom domain. This wasn't true when I originally switched to fastmail. Back then google still had a free personal google apps account which supported custom domains. I pay fastmail because I know what the deal is. I pay them $50 a year and they host my email with my domains. There is no question about what trade we are making. In addition I'm getting to pay a very small amount and support fellow developers building a good product. The old saying is that with google you are the product. Your information is being parsed, stored, tracked, and used to advertise to you. I'm happy to pay a bit of money and not be the product. I don't do this everywhere but there are more then a few places it is true. I also despise ads and will pay money to opt out of them almost everywhere. YoutubeRed, iOS games, etc.
- jimktrains2 10y agoI have the opposite issue with GMail. I spend the same amount of time removing things from the spam folder.
- chmars 10y agoSpam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels. As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps). In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country. That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!
- frabcus 10y agoWorth following all the instructions on https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html I found pointing my MX records straight at Fastmail helped a lot with spam. See "If you use your own domain" in those instructions.