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Comment by mxvzr | Hacker News Reader

After using it for a few months I must say I am not very impressed with FastMail's antispam filter: I am receiving quite a bit of spam (tax/home alarm/life insurance/what-have-you spam) to an alias email. About a dozen a day (maybe it's not that much, but still a whole lot more than I am used to coming from Gmail). I always mark them as spam yet new ones, at a glance very similar to the marked ones, keep making it into the inbox.

Admittedly this is partially my fault since the alias is very-common-firstname@one-of-the-many-domains-offered-by-fastmail.com.

Since you've been with them for awhile now, what is your experience in regards to spam?

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You need to train your personal spam filter [1]. To do this you will need to mark 200 messages as both spam and non-spam. Once the personal spam filter kicks in, it performs very well. In the control panel there should be a section which tells you how many spam/non-spam messages have been recorded. If you do not have enough recorded non-spam messages, you will need to start archiving legitimate messages so they can be seen as non-spam.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html

My challenge is that I don't get spam very often to begin with. It will be several more months until my personal filter kicks on.

And this seems like a big downside initially, until you realize this means FastMail isn't aggregating data about your mail for other users' benefit. FastMail only sends spam samples that you confirm are spam, by both marking as spam, and then permanently deleting.

I've not really noticed a spam problem at all, but I do things like sign up using microsoft+trap@domain-name.com, but even then I haven't really noticed a lot of traffic through that account.

OTOH, I'm pretty anal about protecting my personal email accounts.

I use 33mail.com for that (with a custom domain), it's great.

If you let Fastmail control your DNS, you can use neat aliases like website@me.my.domain instead of me+website@my.domain. That gets around websites with "validation" that rejects addresses with "+" in them, and I think it's a bit more secure since the tagging is less obvious to spammers.

You don't need to let it control your DNS, you can just set wildcard MX.

didn't know that, thanks for the tip.

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