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by nozzlegear 71 days ago
I've been a Fastmail customer for years and have been pretty happy with their spam filtering too. Anything that does get through either gets a custom rule to send it to the shadow realm, or gets sent to a special "Learn spam" folder that I set up which will train the spam filter on that message.
3 comments

Fastmail here too, and my email address is older than Gmail, and probably older than a significant portion of HN posters. Fastmails spam filter just works. I get a few false negatives per month, and some months zero. I've set it to /dev/null the most obvious spam, and I can't recall the last false positive. It's happened, but extremely rarely. Google spam filter is not unique or magical.

And I never liked Gmail the client. It's not as godawful as Outlook, nothing even comes close, but it always gets in my way and does things in weird Googly ways. I'll stick with Kmail, thanks.

Have you noticed decreases over time by sending thigns to the "Learn Spam" folder? I'm a relatively new Fastmail customer - I setup a domain for some family accounts that I can manage on behalf of my aging family members so it's not receiving a lot of email _yet_ but I expect it to in the future.
I have noticed it for sure. The default spam filter catches most of what I'd consider spam, but the Learn Spam feature is needed for things that get through because they look legitimate. For example, I get a lot of those weird "You're an American, I'm from [China, India, etc.], we can make a lot of money if you go to all the interviews/meetings and then let me do all the work" kind of emails. They look like normal correspondence (maybe they are) so they occasionally end up in my inbox. When they do, I send them to the "Learn Spam" folder, and the next time I check my actual Spam folder I'll find that Fastmail caught several more just like it and sent them straight there.
Thanks for the reply, thats good to know!

Incidentally, those emails are definitely from less-than-reputable (and in some proven cases North Korean) actors trying to get footholds into Western Companies! Crazy!

Also Fastmail user for many years, with custom domain. I use specific email addresses per service with Bitwarden’s recent feature (by hand before this). My personal address is shared with few people.

I set up specific folders based on aliases. Thanks to GDPR I have found a few companies that have shared / sold my data illegally (the company-assigned address popped up somewhere else) and managed to have them delete my data right away.

I fret losing my domain, and that my recovery addresses are Gmail and Outlook - which could be lost at any time.

I would like to see government issue a lifetime inbox in the same way they issue you a SSN, a passport or driver license so I can have that as last line recovery.

But on the other hand, if we had that politicians would likely enforce mandatory identification across all web services…