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Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

Yup, I had access to these on my shell that was given to me by my dial-in ISP.

I think what killed these services was a potential for abuse and spam. If you have your name/details attached to an e-mail account, it's super easy for marketers to scrap that, and then spam you if you meet certain criteria.

Centralised services (with all my distaste towards them) prevent that, because they block spammers, and limit access to such data quite nicely.

For a similar reason I think many people stick with gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services. It's also more secure - the Google's budget on maintaining security of their services is far higher than that of any other provider.

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I hear this claim a lot (that Gmail's spam filter is so much better than others) but that hasn't been my experience. Spam was not a problem for my corporate email account at my last job that used Exchange and after switching from Gmail to Proton Mail last year (with the same email address on my own domain) I haven't noticed any real difference in the amount of spam than makes it to my inbox.

It may have been true that Gmail did a much better job than most other services when it first launched but I don't think it's been true for several years now.

MS Exchange on-prem does not include an anti-spam solution. You have to buy one like Symantec security cloud or MS Exchange online security. Exchange is not a 'hosted' solution.

Gmail by contrast is only a hosted/cloud solution, and comes with a security solution as part of the service.

I can compare Symantec Security Cloud sitting in front of an Exchange solution to a Gmail solution, and say that hands down Gmail is far and away better with exactly zero phishing emails making it through compared to numerous attacks able to get through Symantec Security Cloud to our Exchange users.

Comparing Exchange to Gmail is like comparing kwiwis to radishes, in my view.

I'm just saying that my experience as a user of email is that spam is not a problem for me on services other than Gmail. You telling me that it is doesn't change the fact that it hasn't been in my experience. We'd need some sort of actual data to advance the discussion productively.

> ... gmail - because it's centralised, it can use ML to filter out spam much better than any other mailing services.

For me, GMail is worse than useless as a spam filter. I don't know if I have especially unusual email or what, but there's so much ends up in the spam bin I need to wade through it all anyway, so it costs me time.

At least, it did. I've given up on it.

We are well OT but it is interesting to hear the different experiences with Gmail spam filter. I never look there except for curiosity. False positives are extremely rare...for me.

I'm baffled - I have no idea why this would be downvoted. I know that 88k karma and $5 will buy me a $5 coffee, and to that extent karma is completely irrelevant, but it says that somehow, to someone in the HN community, this comment is of negative value.

As I've said elsewhere[0], as an engineer at heart, a model-maker and problem solver, it's like sandpaper on the brain when people act in ways that mystify me, and for which I have no effective, working model.

Baffled.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17007328

I usually don't comment on these sorts of comments, but since you're a very active user I'l bite.

I downvoted you because this type of commentary is the least useful thing you can read on HN.

Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter. What was this supposed to achieve? Some long side-thread with people sharing anecdotes about whether or not GMail worked for them? This is the sort of thing that gets made fun of at n-gate.com.

Also:

    Please don't comment about the
    voting on comments. It never
    does any good, and it makes
    boring reading.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for the response! That gives me something useful to be going on with.

In contrast to your comment, I've always found the personal experiences of HN users to be incredibly valuable data points, which is why I shared my own. I'll re-evaluate that.

WRT the guidelines, I'm painfully aware of that one. While I appreciate its wisdom, it means that one can never learn from the otherwise anonymous downvotes, so to my mind it's worth taking the risk. In this case I really have learned something.

Again, thank you.

As a personal anecdote, I've also noticed that people around me are less interested in personal anecdotes in general. It seems more pronounced over time. I could hypothesize that Facebook and Twitter give people all the anecdotes they need, or that my anecdotes have become more poorly worded over time, but I really have no idea what the cause is.

> Nobody learned anything useful from knowing that some guy with a GMail account isn't pleased with the spam filter.

I didn't, because I'm already aware through personal experience that gmail's spam filter is much too strict, consigning legitimate emails to the spam folder despite the fact that any idiot could tell you they were real.

But in general, I don't see why one user's comment that the spam filter is terrible should be viewed as less "useful" than another user's comment that the spam filter is great.

That's not the difference between the two comments. The positive comment claimed that GMail's filtering was good because they can do it at scale with ML. Yours and the comment I was responding to just assert that it's still bad.

Maybe it is, but no amount of people showing up in the thread asserting that it sucks will make for interesting reading. What would make them interesting is an educated guess about why it's bad.

Making an interesting-and-wrong comment is not obviously better than making an uninteresting-and-correct comment unless you're here purely to be entertained. To me, the uninteresting-and-correct comment is much more valuable.

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