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It very much depends on your account visibility. I have the email address helpme@gmail and it gets about 20 spams a day into my inbox (and thousands to my spam folder, so I'm not arguing that it's a bad filter). So it's far from solved.

However I used to work in anti-spam and so know full well that it's not a solvable problem - no matter what some new startup claims.

I agree, mail has to change at a very basic level to not allow anyone to send spam.

That's impossible. You have two options:

1) Have central control, central management. Facebook has this in their messaging app, and still spend millions of dollars fighting spam on it every year. 2) Have whitelist only email - basically get pre-approval for who can message you. Instant Messaging has this and people still get spammed on it. Plus you lose so much under this model - how many times a year do you email someone you've never emailed before? For me it is in the hundreds.

It's not impossible. It's just bloody difficult.

http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

I don't know what your pedigree is in the anti-spam world (personally I wrote large chunks of SpamAssassin, implemented Symantec's Cloud anti-spam engine from scratch, wrote the Haraka SMTP server, and am one of the authors of RFC 6471), but this is called a FUSSP for a reason.

In short, build a better client, sure, but don't have delusions that you can make spam a thing of the past. It's impossible once you get any level of traction worth talking about.

SpamAssassin is a great tool, nice work.

I understand your point. I'm not convinced that spam with its dangers as we know today can be gone with any solution. I think it needs a long process to reach a point where sending out spam will cost more than profits coming out from it. I'm probably naive and too ambitious but I am going that path.

I don't want to belittle anyones work on fighting spam. It's very complicated and I do know the responsibility of the job and how all of us rely on it.

To be clear on our launch, it will start out as a mail hosting with a nice client having some cool features. All this questionable stuff on spam, parsing receipts, etc. is coming in the future if we're lucky enough to have your support to be around that long.

walshemj 4789 days ago

You would have to drop smtp and go back to the ITU Approved Stack (OSI X.400) where the PTT would run the mail system.

And you would be charged 50p plus tired data charges on top of that per email and like it Sub :-)

BTW I am not suggesting this woudl be a good thing.

lkbm 4789 days ago

False positives are WAY too high for me with Gmail. Once I discovered how many important, obviously-legitimate messages were being marked as spam, I started monitoring my spam folder on a daily basis. You'd think they'd at least whitelist my contact list, but no.

I don't know how they intend to beat Gmail, but that's not because Gmail is without major flaws.

I hear you. The problem with spam is that the current infrastrucutre allows anyone to distribute spam on a massive level and forces online apps to use expensive third party services to deliver their newsletters to inbox. For a regular end user on Gmail the problem is hidden but not solved. When you have spam, you need spam filters. Spammers get better, you must catch up...

We want to solve that by replacing mail as you know it now. It's a long way ahead but we're on it.

bambax 4789 days ago

But then you're not solving end users' problems, but Google's; and who's going to pay you to do that...?

Yes, it's not our main focus right now. We have planned this for later next year. It's not just the Google - everyone who runs online app or shop needs to get to you with order information, registration confirmation, invoice... If it's a pain to get into your inbox for them, it's a pain for you too not getting what you want. We will make it impossible to send out and receive spam using our infrastructure.

bergie 4789 days ago

As usual with Google, they're still not handling multilingual situations too well. It has been a long time since I've seen any spam in English, but tens of mails in languages like Finnish and Georgian get through every day.

I wonder if the easiest solution would be a language blacklist. I have no legitimate reason to want to receive email in languages I don't understand.

This is already available in some SMTP servers.

But it's not a cut and dried situation. It's hard to identify language in very short emails. It's quite possible to get false positives too, when you get mail from someone with an accented name. Language detection gives you a probability that it's in a particular language, not a yes/no.

bambax 4789 days ago

I'm French and receive email in English and French; spam detection seems to work just as well in those two languages.

calinet6 4789 days ago

In addition, when signing up for an invitation to my gmail account, this thing tells me Gmail has problems.

Dude, if Gmail has problems, how the heck do you think you're going to do better? Gmail doesn't have problems. Gmail IS e-mail.