My business uses Fastmail, and I'm mostly happy with it. The one thing I notice every day though, is the spam detection. I start each day by marking 10-15 messages as spam. That's been the case for three years, and I don't seem to be making headway on training their spam filter.
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.
It's interesting that this is the top comment, I'm assuming it's because Gmail users like myself just don't see spam anymore - Google's spam filters are so good that I don't even think about it anymore.
Actually I have a huge issue with Gmail spam filters being over aggressive. Replies to my own emails often find their way to my spam box. I check the spam folder daily and notice at least 5-10 emails that are not spam getting sucked in. Even if I mark them Not Spam, the next day an email from the same address will end up right back there.
I have the same problem. At one time, more than half the Gmail spambox was legitimate email, so I had to check it every day. (It was so bad, I kept screen grabs as evidence.)
This year, things got much better for a few months, and now they are getting worse again....
I definitely had this problem. I moved from a metal server to a VPS which had a different IP address, and it's taken probably 3 months to finally have a decent enough email reputation so that Gmail isn't automatically dumping email into spam. And you have to drill down to even get to that Spam folder too.
It was at the point where I really couldn't effectively communicate with anyone on gmail because of that. The answer I kept getting was "Well, why don't you just use Gmail instead of your own email stuff?"
It's kind of scary to me sometimes just how well Google has managed to get people to equate email with Gmail.
The middle of last year is when it started for me. It only affects my personal Gmail account, though. My Google for Business account seems to work fine, and I get a lot more mail there. I can't imagine they use two different filters, but it seems to almost be the case. Either that or there is a bug in one platform with the Not Spam button not working properly.
GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering.
I read that forum rant and the linked content, and there is still no evidence that Gmail is deleting emails immediately by default. I read two possible causes:
- Content Compliance setting (managed by admin) that can prevent emails from reaching inbox
- Some other service, such as Exchange, which can somehow interfere with Gmail?
Specifically, the article mentions a "quarantine" folder that is not part of Gmail. Or am I missing something?
The quarantine folder you mention is part of the content compliance settings. Mail that matches content compliance rules goes into a quarantine that only admins can access.
This is demonstrably not true. Just send mail to an email list that you are on. The email will be sent (confirm with other list members), however you will not receive it when it is relayed to the group by the listserver.
That's actually an incredibly annoying fallout of gmail's deduplication that cannot be disabled. I believe gmail de-duplicates your list echo because it sees a copy in your sent folder. I wish it could be disabled :-/
If list owners wanted this to be a feature, you could configure it on a list basis, at least in mailman. However nobody does, because it's incredibly annoying :-)
Agreed. Whenever I mail a list if I have an important message I have to ask someone if the message appeared or not. I can't verify by receiving my own copy. I use mail lists every day.
It will frequently gobble up multi-lingual emails. I discovered this when I ignored a customer in Chile for a while because he had a Spanish email signature.
> bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently
Do you have any proof for that - I don't want to see it in detail, but I cannot remember a single incidence where my mail was just silently eaten by google? But I agree with what you said implicitly: gmail should let users chose between "move to spam", "only flag as spam" and "simply delete"; I share your pain of having to go through the spam-folder to find the one mis-classified mail once a month.
EDIT: I have had many user reports about this but when checking mail server logs I always could pin-point the problem at either the local server config or being caught in some "you are evil" classification - the latter much more time intensive to fix....)
I'm afraid to test it out with my personal account, but I wonder what would happen if you sent a test to a gmail account with the GTUBE spam signature? You know, the one that scores 999 points with Spamassassin.
Gmail's anti-spam filters have the opposite problem, putting a ton of legit emails into the spam folder.
The other day I had to sign a NDA from Google and it ended up in the spam folder. We were on the phone for over 20 minutes just waiting for the NDA to come, until I decided to check the spam folder and sure enough, there it was.
The spam filter is in my opinion too dumb for this age. Once you mark one email from one domain as a spam, every single email from that domain ends up in the spam folder also. For instance I don't want to see stupid Comcast commercial offerings but I need to receive my invoice every month. Unsubscribe works sometimes, but not all the time.
I, too, have run into this. One email setup was moved to Google Apps, and it flagged JIRA email as spam. Once that was fixed, I figured I was good, but more recently it flagged a document share request... from Google Docs... originating from within the same organization (i.e. same Google Apps account). Left hand, meet right hand.
Yes, but Google spam filters are too aggressive. It is worthwhile adding that once in a while I keep running into a message lying in Spam that ought to have been in Inbox.
Due to a recent bad experience of email being mis-categorised, I've taken to checking the gmail spam folder again several times a week, just to be sure :-\
Yup, though for me, I've only seen this happen with two different work google apps/gmail accounts, not my personal account. In one case, it caused a bit of a problem!
It pays to check for false positives from time to time. Other than that, Gmail's spam filter is really impressive, especially given that I have catch-all enabled (via Google Apps).
The challenge with spam filtering isn't in stopping all spam, but rather with nother filtering that one random email that turns out to lead to a life-changing opportunity..
Spam was the main reason why I moved back from Fastmail to Gmail. Another reason was the lacking support for special characters, i.e., characters not found in standard English, for example in search. IMAP was great, however, I missed Gmail's way of filing sent mails with labels.
As a Gmail user, you are simply no longer used to daily spam messages, even if you use catch-all (via Google Apps).
In terms of privacy, Fastmail had no advantage over Gmail (via Google Apps) for me; both providers have servers in the US and are based in a Five Eyes country.
That does not of course not mean that Fastmail cannot be a great alternative for many users, it was simply not sufficiently better than Gmail for me. It is great to see that there is still a niche for a 'native' IMAP provider with some extras!
I had huge problems with spam on Fastmail, enough that after my year ended I moved to another provide. I really liked Fastmail, and the service was pretty good (although when I asked them why my domain was getting put into spam filters they couldn't really help much).
Now I'm with Mailbox.org, and they're really good. A little cheaper too.
Now a days there aren't actually good free providers. Google charges a yearly fee if you want to use a custom domain.
This wasn't true when I originally switched to fastmail. Back then google still had a free personal google apps account which supported custom domains. I pay fastmail because I know what the deal is. I pay them $50 a year and they host my email with my domains. There is no question about what trade we are making. In addition I'm getting to pay a very small amount and support fellow developers building a good product.
The old saying is that with google you are the product. Your information is being parsed, stored, tracked, and used to advertise to you. I'm happy to pay a bit of money and not be the product. I don't do this everywhere but there are more then a few places it is true. I also despise ads and will pay money to opt out of them almost everywhere. YoutubeRed, iOS games, etc.
Because they aren't free, there is always a cost. Not only that, a single Gmail tab can take up 350-500 mb RAM. Lastly, getting Gmail on a custom domain is not "free" anymore.
I had a similar issue with FastMail - if I remember correctly, it needs 200 messages to be moved from inbox to junk and 200 moved from junk to inbox before the personalised filter kicks in.
The more, the better. I've 1600 learned spam and 7677 learned non-spam. The spam filter works pretty well for me. Occasionally one slips through, but that happened on gmail as well. So I'm very happy with FastMail.
It's a similar thing on Rackspace's email. Their spam filter never learns anything. Marking something as "Not Spam" just adds a whitelisting rule for that sender for that particular email account. You can bypass all of Rackspace's email filters simply by UTF8 encoding the from address and subject.
Spam filtering at most big providers is still abysmal.
It's a small thing, takes me all of 10 seconds, but I do notice it, every morning.