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