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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

FastMail's client is way zippier than Gmail's (seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments without waiting for things to load, you wonder what black magic they're using to make it appear so seamless). Of course, it isn't free.

Gmail's interface hasn't significantly improved since... maybe smart labels, several years ago? I'd argue it's been surpassed, and most of it's features are par for the course today.

A much larger reason people are Gmail users is because it's incredibly hard to move providers if you have an (at)mailprovider.com email address.

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> seriously, when you scroll through a 10,000 email folder in moments

Err, no. Scrolling through 10k emails is a UX disaster. There's a reason why Search exists, and it's this use case. If your email is properly categorized, you rarely end up with folders that large anyway.

I've yet to see anyone handle email categorization and filtering anywhere close to as sanely as Gmail, and I seem to try everything about once a year, get pissed that nobody else can figure it out, and go right back to Gmail. It's especially important to someone like me who's on dozens of open source mailing lists and needs to cross-correlate conversations between lists ("[List Y] Hey I need to update X to make Y work again." "Go talk to someone on list X and file a bug on X's tracker..." "[Bugtracker X] Bug for making Y work again" is an incredibly common email workflow in OSS-land).

My biggest pain in email these days is that Gmail hasn't implemented any kind of smart filter for idiots that can't figure out their own email address - (namely, people signing up for email lists and using services thinking they have my email address... I keep getting incredibly absurd why-the-hell-are-you-even-emailing-this email including medical records, police reports, travel documents, confidential legal communications, etc. from people who share my particular first-letter-last-name pair).

I certainly don't scroll through a 10,000 email folder while looking for something, but my point is that the UI can handle it, and does so with incredible speed.

I more or less feel Gmail's filtering thinks it's smarter than it is, it doesn't value my opinion much: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813203

Also Gmail's spam filtering is still unparalleled.

I actually pipe my Fastmail through Gmail just for the spam filtering. Sigh.

Kinda wish they released their spam filtering service as a stand-alone service.

You can customise your Fastmail spam filtering if needed, however after 15 years of Fastmail email, I still get virtual zero spam.

I barely get any spam at all on FastMail. The spam I do get is classified fairly well, but I haven't even gotten enough spam in the 18 months since I switched to FastMail to get personalized filtering enabled! (200 spam messages)

Assuming spam filtering is "good enough", which it is, I'd rather not have my mail used for helping other people's mail get filtered better. FastMail solely uses email you confirm as spam to help their spam reporting efforts, and you can even disable that setting. No accidental spam gets mined for any purpose outside your own account's benefit.

I also feel Gmail trusts it's own opinion more than yours, with regards to training behavior. I used to have receipts from some stores always marked as "promotions" or even "spam", no matter how many times I tried to teach Gmail otherwise.

I'm very happy to share to and benefit from the collective emails of other users, because it yields noticeably better results for me.

With Fastmail, if I push the spam filtering too aggressively then I get constant false positives. With Gmail, there's no tweaking and I maybe get one or two false positives per year, and never anything very important.

Obviously different people have different kinds of emails/inbox volume/etc, but that's my experience.

The ideal case would be if the default options for spam filtering worked really well, and you could also still go tweak the levers if you wanted. It's not that Gmail doesn't have levers for adjusting spam filtering, it's just that Google has decided you shouldn't be allowed to adjust them yourself.

I definitely think FastMail's default spam filtering settings are good enough as is, but you're definitely right, different people have different experiences. The email address I currently use is only three years old, give or take, so it likely hasn't ended up on nearly as many spam lists (yet) as the average Gmail-user-since-2006.

Yea, my goes-to-gmail email is my "public" email that has been around since forever and is in plaintext on a bunch of websites and every commit etc.

The only reason Gmail's spam filtering is so good is because they have market dominance, and have much more data than anyone else.

If you give me all emails of 2 billion people, I can build you such a good spam filter as well.

Huh? Incorrect spam filtering is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from gmail. I routinely have to check my spam 'folder' to restore messages that aren't spam.

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