Hacker News Reader

Comment by erdaniels | Hacker News Reader

Might as well put it here since Fastmail doesn’t come up often. Does anyone find Fastmail’s spam detection to be pretty mediocre? I usually get a few obviously spam emails a week in my inbox. The volume is low so I don’t mind it but that’s really the one thing I miss from Gmail.

View on HN

I find it far superior to Gmail because although Fastmail occasionally does not flag spam, Fastmail almost never sends legitimate mail to spam. Gmail would routinely give false positives which in my view is much worse than occasional false negatives.

Been on FastMail since 2016 and I barely receive any spam to begin with. It took me years to hit the 200 spam emails to activate the personalized filter, which brought my false positive rate to zero.

The problem I frequently encounter is with emails incorrectly classified as spam. Once a month I go to spam folder and find few emails that were not spam. Even though I click "not spam" on each, I don't feel algorithm is getting any better with time.

Once the personalized filter is activated (requires marking 200 as spam and 200 as not-spam), this problem should go away entirely. It did for me anyways.

Not at all. Rarely ever get a spam email in Fastmail. Gmail is the worst in my experience. It’s far too aggressive and would regularly capture legit emails when I used it. I lost a few important emails this way. The best email filter I ever had was to use greylisting on a self hosted email machine - this method had almost 100% perfect filtering for me. Unfortunately custom email servers don’t really work in the modern email ecosystem. Fastmail is the best managed system I think at the moment and have been happy with it for years now.

Spam detection requires a few ingredients:

1. Lots of email that you can categorize.

2. Lots of users to label the email as spam or not spam.

3. Tons of code to identify classifiable features such as clickable links, the ASN from which the message originated, and so many other things.

4. Some kind of classifier that pulls all the above into a decision about each message. And make sure it’s really fast and doesn’t require gargantuan resources either, because you’re trying to provide cheap mailboxes.

Google has enormous advantages in solving for spam filtering. It has over a billion active users, enormous computing resources, and top AI talent. Not to mention legions of talented general programmers to build all the feature extraction stuff. Competing with Google on spam filtering is an unwinnable game IMHO.

FastMail just uses SpamAssassin btw; I'm not sure if they have any modifications, but based on the results it seems just the standard SA.

This is astonishing to me, considering that Jeremy Howard is a leading AI guru.

All I know is what I can see from the X-Spam headers they add with that matched rules, which are SA's. FastMail has been around for ages, and I guess it's "good enough" (or at least, not "bad enough" to replace). It's not so easy to replace a tested (though imperfect) solution like SA with some new AI stuff, even of it would be better; it's all about ROI.

Also, not sure if Howard is still involved to FastMail? They sold to Opera in 2010, although they've been independent again since 2013, but it looks like the 2010 sale was the end of Howard's involvement?

I trained the “personal” filter myself using their instructions years ago when I first started using them and it’s been pretty solid since.

I would imagine that they have far less email volume to train any kind of spam-classifying AI on, as well as a smaller amount of (human) resources to spend on advanced spam classification. Google has a huge leg up in this particular aspect.

Another big aspect is FastMail can't use non-spam emails for training data. And users can opt out of having even their spam emails used for classification. FastMail doesn't co-opt people's data for their own use so they rely entirely on voluntary sharing.

I regularly receive spam in gmail (russian and gmail originated spam) in main inbox.

And promotions box is usually just spam.

Also lately started getting spam google calendar events and they just wont go away even after reporting them as spam multiple times. I don't why is that even a feature, why can someone completely random add recurring-daily events to your calendar.

You can disable this somewhere, it scraps your emails (also spam) and adds up any ical events to your calendar which generates the event notifications...

Can be fullly disabled somehow in gmail settings.

Thanks will search that.

edit: for anyone else looking, it was in calendar settings page

ive been using fastmail for several years and this hasnt been an issue for me.

My “Personal Spam Filter” is trained and spam has not been an issue for me.

Indeed. I went through the efforts of creating their recommended “learn safe” and “learn spam” folders, but this didn’t help. There doesn’t seem to be a way to reset their spam dataset.

yes, e.g. thunderbird's builtin junk filter seemed much better to me. Gmail's too.

I believe I saw somewhere that fastmail's spamfilter may have a 'feature' that whitelists mails from certain senders so that spam gets through if it was forwarded via my university account.

There even was an option to tell Fastmail about these forwarding accounts, but it didn't seem to work, maybe due to multi-hop forwards.

My spam folder seems to catch a fair bit across my hundreds of aliases so far

Is that not the idea more than relying on the spam filter. Just delete aliases?

I never get any spam on Fastmail, I set up a training folder and it has been solid for the past 5 years or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com