Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I had a major issue with spam on FM and after some back and forth with support, I got some understanding of their system:

1. The bayesian filter updates only when you actually delete emails from the Spam folder.

2. There is a global and a personal spam filter. The personal one kicks in after 200 spam emails have been ingested/deleted. You need to break it in, like a pair of leather shoes.

3. Before this 200 email threshold, make use of automated rules to just mark stuff as Spam automatically, if like me, they have all a similar pattern. When your personal filter kicks in, you're golden and works as expected.

I don't have any spam issue anymore and I don't think I've ever seen a false positive either. So now it's smooth sailing.

I wish Fastmail documented this process, which was explained to me by their support after a dozen exchanges.

Funny aside: all the spam overwhelmingly comes from gmail.com accounts. Seems like Google needs to work on their terrible outgoing spam issue. They're the biggest spam sender now that no one runs open mail servers on the Internet anymore.

> all the spam overwhelmingly comes from gmail.com accounts.

Report it to google, and make the world a better place.

But, first check the first received header that was added by your mail provider's servers to make sure the spam really is coming from gmail's servers-- oldest received headers are at the bottom, newer as you go up (e.g., view message source, view headers, or some such option in your client; look for received: from...).

Add a short blurb at the top of your message about spam received from their domain, include the message with full headers as text at the end of the email message body (some clients like MS outlook break mail, so this may be the only way the recipient will be able to view the headers if the sender is using one of these broken clients. Also attach the original spam message as an attachment (this will provide something useful to the recipient when sent by most ?all? non-Microsoft mail clients).

Send it to abuse@gmail.com

Report the stuff your spam filter catches too.

At past jobs, we took these reports very seriously. They were usually an indication that a user's account was compromised.

Thanks for the advice. That said, there's hundreds of email addresses I get spammed from.

> Report it to google, and make the world a better place.

That's line is not gonna work on me. Google is a trillion dollar company that only cares about its bottom line, not a public good. They can sort it out themselves.

I have better things to do with my time than do Google spam team's job for free by reporting each spam email I receive manually.

They literally don't care. Tried many times. It's like trying to talk to a black hole. :(

I still report spam to all ISPs/mail providers, if they have a proper abuse@dom contact and I can spare the few moments it takes. And, also report the spam/scam mail contact reply-to: addresses to their respective email providers when they differ from the sender provider. When scam mails contain URLs, I'll report those to their domain registrar / webhost.

I've had good responses from most places. An Eastern European domain registrar has revoked several scammer domains after my notifications. Some ISPs are a waste of time to send reports to, e.g., a few in E. Europe, and Colo Crossing. But, it is usually worth it to report abuse. I have an emeritus email address from a former employer where I made it my project since the pandemic to report all spam/scam mail received to that address. I cannot state that this is the reason nor even the main reason, but the volume of spam to that address has gone from a firehose to a single spam/scam message every 1-3 weeks.

> Report it to google, and make the world a better place.

Are you kidding? The Goo has never paid any attention to the victims of spam emanating from gmail accounts.

For a long time I thought the spam filtering was not very good, but what eventually led to that was my own mistake of setting "learn as spam" on the spam folder itself. In Fastmail's own words:

> Note: We recommend that you do not mark your Spam/Junk Mail folder to automatically learn as spam. This can create a false positive feedback loop. Imagine an email is incorrectly classified as spam, put in your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and then learned as spam. That means future emails that aren't spam are now more likely to be incorrectly marked as spam, sent to your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and learned as spam. Only mark folders to learn as spam if they're folders you manually move email to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com