3 ms·

Based on my experience running mail servers in the past (both personal and corporate), I'd say you're wrong.

jjav 5y ago
Based on my experience running mail servers for a long time and today, I'd say OP is right. gmail spam filtering is terrible. On my various gmail accounts, I both get spam and the good email goes to the spam folder. And there's nothing you can do, you can mark it not-spam a thousand times and it's still a crapshoot. I don't have any of those problems with my self-hosted email.
entropie 5y ago
I second this. Gmail spam filtering is top notch. I just stopped to care to obfuscate or hide my email adress (which I use since the beta invitation program of gmail) and I can count the spam I actually read in a year with one hand.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  "I can count the spam I actually read in a year with one hand." This is partly because Gmail is good at classifying emails as spam/ham. But it's partly because it's more tolerant of false positives (ham sent to the spam folder) than you or I would be if we were tweaking our own spam filter. I occasionally check my spam folder, and there are usually some mailing list emails that I don't care about, but which I did actually subscribe to, and would have wanted to reach my inbox.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > Gmail is good at classifying emails as spam/ham. I wish they'd apply that discrimination to their SMTP output.
- nh2 5y ago
  Gmail's spam filtering has a high false positive rate. It classifies Stripe's and PayPal's important security emails as spam; I posted previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536465 It's easy to bring down the number of false negatives if you allow the number of false positives to be arbitrarily large. On my GSuite business email, I've had > 50 incoming business-relevant emails this year that were incorrectly classified as spam. My personal self-hosted email server [1] lets through a bit more spam than Gmail, but it also doesn't suffer this big false-positive rate. [1]: https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf

jjav 5y ago

Based on my experience running mail servers for a long time and today, I'd say OP is right. gmail spam filtering is terrible. On my various gmail accounts, I both get spam and the good email goes to the spam folder. And there's nothing you can do, you can mark it not-spam a thousand times and it's still a crapshoot. I don't have any of those problems with my self-hosted email.

entropie 5y ago

I second this. Gmail spam filtering is top notch. I just stopped to care to obfuscate or hide my email adress (which I use since the beta invitation program of gmail) and I can count the spam I actually read in a year with one hand.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
"I can count the spam I actually read in a year with one hand." This is partly because Gmail is good at classifying emails as spam/ham. But it's partly because it's more tolerant of false positives (ham sent to the spam folder) than you or I would be if we were tweaking our own spam filter. I occasionally check my spam folder, and there are usually some mailing list emails that I don't care about, but which I did actually subscribe to, and would have wanted to reach my inbox.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Gmail is good at classifying emails as spam/ham. I wish they'd apply that discrimination to their SMTP output.
nh2 5y ago
Gmail's spam filtering has a high false positive rate. It classifies Stripe's and PayPal's important security emails as spam; I posted previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536465 It's easy to bring down the number of false negatives if you allow the number of false positives to be arbitrarily large. On my GSuite business email, I've had > 50 incoming business-relevant emails this year that were incorrectly classified as spam. My personal self-hosted email server [1] lets through a bit more spam than Gmail, but it also doesn't suffer this big false-positive rate. [1]: https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf