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...and saving email at the same time. It's totally unusable without spam filters, and the open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabiliti

...and saving email at the same time. It's totally unusable without spam filters, and the open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabilities.

candiddevmike 3y ago
Ironically, most of my breakthrough spam seems to come from @gmail.com addresses...
- solardev 3y ago
  Same, but that's because all the other hundreds of pages of spam got filtered away already. I wouldn't be surprised if Gmail spam is higher-effort (like those individual SMS spam apps that politicians use) but higher-breakthrough.
  - supertrope 3y ago
    I read years ago a hijacked Gmail account was worth $10 on a black market while a Yahoo! Email account was worth $0.10.
rurp 3y ago
Perhaps, but it's hard to say. False positives are much more harmful than false negatives. I have peronally had Gmail flag a number of legit emails as spam, and those are just the ones I know about! It's almost certain that I have lost valuable messages because I didn't check the spam folder in time. These aren't transactional emails either, I'm talking about messages from real people that I know personally. I would be willing to wade through a number of additional spam emails to avoid losing important ones but of course this is Google so there is no user facing dial to adjust the sensitivity. Users just have to trust that Google's generalized approach is well calibrated for them.
- solardev 3y ago
  I'd take the false positives, personally. If someone really needs to reach me and doesn't get to me on the first try, they usually just email or text back and go "Hey, did you get my email?". Or, just quickly skim through the spam folder once a week.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Unless they always get filtered. Which has happened to me before where people wondered why I was ghosting them. I now skim my spam filter regularly because of this, but not everyone realizes they should do this.
    - solardev 3y ago
      > Which has happened to me before where people wondered why I was ghosting them. Same, but I feel like it's almost kinda socially acceptable now. Happens to everyone and it's not something to get upset about... "oh, it wasn't me, it just went to spam." Like Gmail managed to alter our public norms instead of ensuring a zero false-positive rate :)
  - rurp 3y ago
    Sometimes people will reach out again, but that doesn't cover all cases. If an old friend/acquaintance/relative who I don't regularly talk to reaches out and I miss the email they will probably assume I blew them off. Scenarios like they will be in the area and asking if I want to meet up, or maybe sharing something notable that happened to come up. It sounds like a lot of people here check their spam folder regularly, which is good, but I don't know how widespread that is. I remember Gmail early on deemphasizing the spam folder since, in their view, the filtering was so good people didn't need to check it.
- ahoka 3y ago
  Most people I know regularly read their spam folders… which kinda defeats the purpose.
  - 3y ago
fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
My personal mailserver works just fine with some rudimentary anti-spam measures (mostly manual filter lists).
muppetman 3y ago
"open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabilities" I disagree with you. I use Postfix with rspamd plugged into it for my personal email account. I get way more spam to my gmail than I do to my personal account, and I sign up to everything with my personal account. rspam also dkim signs my emails when I send them etc, verifies SPF/DKIM/DMARC on recipet etc. Now to counter that - I am a TINY mail server - Probably 100 emails a day tops.
- solardev 3y ago
  FWIW, this would make a great blog post (or Show HN) with details! "I run my own mail server and get better spam results than Gmail"
  - martin_a 3y ago
    I think that's pretty standard for everybody who runs its own mail server (like "shared webhosting"-running even). Owning your mail should also be standard for everybody in tech, you don't want to rely on Google for something that important.
    - muppetman 3y ago
      Exactly. I rely on Google for a number of things, the primary thing being photos. But I've read too many horror stories (on here) of people losing their Google account and thus their life. So all my photos are also backed up locally and then into a BackBlaze bucket. Using Postfix+Rspamd gave me good insight into SPF, DKIM and DMARC and how to use them effectively.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      I mean, electricity is also very important, but that doesn't imply that everybody in tech should be configuring their own wiring. It's fine to do that if you want to, but it is completely reasonable to expect that most people should be able to rely on someone else to do the work of ensuring that the key infrastructure runs well, and not think about it so that they can focus on the specialization they want to handle.
megous 3y ago
Any data? Or just "I say so"... Before I decided to leave it due to its horrendous false positive rate, gmail was driving like half of notification emails from my servers and mailing lists to spam, despite me never marking them as such. I was regularly missing important things. It's much better with just regular client side bogofilter and some training on my personal mail/spam archive. And I do zero server side filtering, it's just all content based. I don't care about capabilities, I just want near 0 false positive rate on the kind of email I receive (and not some common model), even at cost of some false negatives, and Gmail doesn't deliver there at all. And I don't want any arbitrary 5xx rejections for my senders, since I know how annoying that is on the sender side. Gmail will not guarantee that.
- solardev 3y ago
  No, sorry, it's purely anecdotal. And also more applicable to the last few decades, when other email services were still terrible, than nowadays with many adequate options. I think I have the opposite preference to you: false positives are OK to me if that means less spam gets through. In fact I've seen many of those notifications in my gmail spam and thought to myself, "Huh, you know, maybe I don't need those that badly after all... I'll just let gmail keep it there." The overwhelming majority of my human contacts use other channels anyway (some chat app, or SMS), not email. I might get like ten real emails from humans in a year, and even then 90% of them are from people already in my contact list (and so bypass spam). Phone calls are similar these days. Google Fi/Android also applies a similarly strict spam filter to incoming calls, and marks and blocks a lot of them as spam. I check once in a while, but overall I just don't really mind. If someone really needs to reach me they'll find a way... if they don't try, it's a good filter for how important their message really is anyway, lol.
  - megous 3y ago
    I largely communicate with people who contact me for the first time (people who use my FOSS projects). Different needs, I guess.
    - solardev 3y ago
einpoklum 3y ago
email is perfectly usable without _Google_'s spam filters. And if you use non-GMail email providers, you would know they do fine. Not perfect, and of course it differs among providers, countries and accounts, but it's generally fine.
kiwijamo 3y ago
You mean the same Gmail that is responsible for >50% of all spam to other providers? They may be good at filtering mail from other providers to Gmail accounts, but they are lousy when it comes to the other direction i.e., mail out of Gmail to other providers. Unless they're prepared to block their own users from sending spam to other providers (or even other Gmail users) this initiative won't be of much use.
pinkgolem 3y ago
using Rspamd i have 0 spam in my private email adress
account42 3y ago
> It's totally unusable without spam filters No it isn't.

...and saving email at the same time. It's totally unusable without spam filters, and the open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabilities.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Ironically, most of my breakthrough spam seems to come from @gmail.com addresses...

solardev 3y ago
Same, but that's because all the other hundreds of pages of spam got filtered away already. I wouldn't be surprised if Gmail spam is higher-effort (like those individual SMS spam apps that politicians use) but higher-breakthrough.
- supertrope 3y ago
  I read years ago a hijacked Gmail account was worth $10 on a black market while a Yahoo! Email account was worth $0.10.

rurp 3y ago

Perhaps, but it's hard to say. False positives are much more harmful than false negatives. I have peronally had Gmail flag a number of legit emails as spam, and those are just the ones I know about! It's almost certain that I have lost valuable messages because I didn't check the spam folder in time. These aren't transactional emails either, I'm talking about messages from real people that I know personally. I would be willing to wade through a number of additional spam emails to avoid losing important ones but of course this is Google so there is no user facing dial to adjust the sensitivity. Users just have to trust that Google's generalized approach is well calibrated for them.

solardev 3y ago
I'd take the false positives, personally. If someone really needs to reach me and doesn't get to me on the first try, they usually just email or text back and go "Hey, did you get my email?". Or, just quickly skim through the spam folder once a week.
- jghn 3y ago
  Unless they always get filtered. Which has happened to me before where people wondered why I was ghosting them. I now skim my spam filter regularly because of this, but not everyone realizes they should do this.
  - solardev 3y ago
    > Which has happened to me before where people wondered why I was ghosting them. Same, but I feel like it's almost kinda socially acceptable now. Happens to everyone and it's not something to get upset about... "oh, it wasn't me, it just went to spam." Like Gmail managed to alter our public norms instead of ensuring a zero false-positive rate :)
- rurp 3y ago
  Sometimes people will reach out again, but that doesn't cover all cases. If an old friend/acquaintance/relative who I don't regularly talk to reaches out and I miss the email they will probably assume I blew them off. Scenarios like they will be in the area and asking if I want to meet up, or maybe sharing something notable that happened to come up. It sounds like a lot of people here check their spam folder regularly, which is good, but I don't know how widespread that is. I remember Gmail early on deemphasizing the spam folder since, in their view, the filtering was so good people didn't need to check it.
ahoka 3y ago
Most people I know regularly read their spam folders… which kinda defeats the purpose.
- 3y ago

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago

My personal mailserver works just fine with some rudimentary anti-spam measures (mostly manual filter lists).

muppetman 3y ago

"open models/blacklists don't come anywhere close to Gmail's capabilities" I disagree with you. I use Postfix with rspamd plugged into it for my personal email account. I get way more spam to my gmail than I do to my personal account, and I sign up to everything with my personal account. rspam also dkim signs my emails when I send them etc, verifies SPF/DKIM/DMARC on recipet etc. Now to counter that - I am a TINY mail server - Probably 100 emails a day tops.

solardev 3y ago
FWIW, this would make a great blog post (or Show HN) with details! "I run my own mail server and get better spam results than Gmail"
- martin_a 3y ago
  I think that's pretty standard for everybody who runs its own mail server (like "shared webhosting"-running even). Owning your mail should also be standard for everybody in tech, you don't want to rely on Google for something that important.
  - muppetman 3y ago
    Exactly. I rely on Google for a number of things, the primary thing being photos. But I've read too many horror stories (on here) of people losing their Google account and thus their life. So all my photos are also backed up locally and then into a BackBlaze bucket. Using Postfix+Rspamd gave me good insight into SPF, DKIM and DMARC and how to use them effectively.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    I mean, electricity is also very important, but that doesn't imply that everybody in tech should be configuring their own wiring. It's fine to do that if you want to, but it is completely reasonable to expect that most people should be able to rely on someone else to do the work of ensuring that the key infrastructure runs well, and not think about it so that they can focus on the specialization they want to handle.

megous 3y ago

Any data? Or just "I say so"... Before I decided to leave it due to its horrendous false positive rate, gmail was driving like half of notification emails from my servers and mailing lists to spam, despite me never marking them as such. I was regularly missing important things. It's much better with just regular client side bogofilter and some training on my personal mail/spam archive. And I do zero server side filtering, it's just all content based. I don't care about capabilities, I just want near 0 false positive rate on the kind of email I receive (and not some common model), even at cost of some false negatives, and Gmail doesn't deliver there at all. And I don't want any arbitrary 5xx rejections for my senders, since I know how annoying that is on the sender side. Gmail will not guarantee that.

solardev 3y ago
No, sorry, it's purely anecdotal. And also more applicable to the last few decades, when other email services were still terrible, than nowadays with many adequate options. I think I have the opposite preference to you: false positives are OK to me if that means less spam gets through. In fact I've seen many of those notifications in my gmail spam and thought to myself, "Huh, you know, maybe I don't need those that badly after all... I'll just let gmail keep it there." The overwhelming majority of my human contacts use other channels anyway (some chat app, or SMS), not email. I might get like ten real emails from humans in a year, and even then 90% of them are from people already in my contact list (and so bypass spam). Phone calls are similar these days. Google Fi/Android also applies a similarly strict spam filter to incoming calls, and marks and blocks a lot of them as spam. I check once in a while, but overall I just don't really mind. If someone really needs to reach me they'll find a way... if they don't try, it's a good filter for how important their message really is anyway, lol.
- megous 3y ago
  I largely communicate with people who contact me for the first time (people who use my FOSS projects). Different needs, I guess.
  - solardev 3y ago

einpoklum 3y ago

email is perfectly usable without _Google_'s spam filters. And if you use non-GMail email providers, you would know they do fine. Not perfect, and of course it differs among providers, countries and accounts, but it's generally fine.

kiwijamo 3y ago

You mean the same Gmail that is responsible for >50% of all spam to other providers? They may be good at filtering mail from other providers to Gmail accounts, but they are lousy when it comes to the other direction i.e., mail out of Gmail to other providers. Unless they're prepared to block their own users from sending spam to other providers (or even other Gmail users) this initiative won't be of much use.

pinkgolem 3y ago

using Rspamd i have 0 spam in my private email adress

account42 3y ago

> It's totally unusable without spam filters No it isn't.