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Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than alm

Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail was popular and it was a nightmare, I'll never do it again. If a company asks me to do it, I'll quit. Even if you put Gmail aside, email became reputation based, which is naturally going to mean the larger centralized platforms will succeed over a few independent outliers because they will always have a better reputation and control what is allowed to go out or in. Just like how the United States still has a large role in the internet and what is seen internationally because so much is still centralized within those borders, or the centralized companies that are within those borders control it.

siriussidus 8y ago
I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure FastMail uses Spamassassin, so why is an email company so bad at configuring that software? Their spam filtering is simply not nearly as good as Gmail, it's not even close. I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it. Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.

siriussidus 8y ago

I disagree vehemently on the difficulty of running your own email server. I have been running a pretty standard postfix + dovecot email setup for myself and close family for almost a decade now. It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off. Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
I'm pretty sure FastMail uses Spamassassin, so why is an email company so bad at configuring that software? Their spam filtering is simply not nearly as good as Gmail, it's not even close. I used Spamassassin back in the day and it was effective for a bit, and then pretty much all spammers figured out how to avoid it. Also, I'm not talking about the obvious VIAGRA large caps spam, which I think is fairly easy to solve. But spam has become much more nuanced and Gmail is the best at it, and the false positive rate is still amazing.