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Also Gmail's spam filtering is still unparalleled. I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh. Kinda wish they released their

by shazow 9y ago

Also Gmail's spam filtering is still unparalleled. I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh. Kinda wish they released their spam filtering service as a stand-alone service.

jon_adler 9y ago
You can customise your Fastmail spam filtering if needed, however after 15 years of Fastmail email, I still get virtual zero spam.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I barely get any spam at all on FastMail. The spam I do get is classified fairly well, but I haven't even gotten enough spam in the 18 months since I switched to FastMail to get personalized filtering enabled! (200 spam messages) Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit. I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.
- shazow 9y ago
  I'm very happy to share to and benefit from the collective emails of other users, because it yields noticeably better results for me. With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important. Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    The ideal case would be if the default options for spam filtering worked really well, and you could also still go tweak the levers if you wanted. It's not that Gmail doesn't have levers for adjusting spam filtering, it's just that Google has decided you shouldn't be allowed to adjust them yourself. I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.
    - shazow 9y ago
      Yea, my goes-to-gmail email is my "public" email that has been around since forever and is in plaintext on a bunch of websites and every commit etc.
kuschku 9y ago
The only reason Gmail's spam filtering is so good is because they have market dominance, and have much more data than anyone else. If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.
getpost 9y ago
Huh? Incorrect spam filtering is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from gmail. I routinely have to check my spam 'folder' to restore messages that aren't spam.

by shazow 9y ago

jon_adler 9y ago

You can customise your Fastmail spam filtering if needed, however after 15 years of Fastmail email, I still get virtual zero spam.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I barely get any spam at all on FastMail. The spam I do get is classified fairly well, but I haven't even gotten enough spam in the 18 months since I switched to FastMail to get personalized filtering enabled! (200 spam messages) Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit. I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.

shazow 9y ago
I'm very happy to share to and benefit from the collective emails of other users, because it yields noticeably better results for me. With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important. Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  The ideal case would be if the default options for spam filtering worked really well, and you could also still go tweak the levers if you wanted. It's not that Gmail doesn't have levers for adjusting spam filtering, it's just that Google has decided you shouldn't be allowed to adjust them yourself. I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.
  - shazow 9y ago
    Yea, my goes-to-gmail email is my "public" email that has been around since forever and is in plaintext on a bunch of websites and every commit etc.

kuschku 9y ago

The only reason Gmail's spam filtering is so good is because they have market dominance, and have much more data than anyone else. If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.

getpost 9y ago

Huh? Incorrect spam filtering is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from gmail. I routinely have to check my spam 'folder' to restore messages that aren't spam.