When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.
Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.
Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.
For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.
What gmail did to email, was provide an insanely good spam filter compared to others. It was in their best interest to keep everyones ads out of your email except their own.
To this very day, I know nobody - NOBODY - who even comes close to Gmail’s spam filtering capability.
They bought up postini. Before then their spam filtering was poor.
They then leveraged that to get enterprises ising postini into their email service. This created a vacuum for enterprise spam filtering since many customers did not like the Gmail enterprise features or changes to UI.
Is this how we’ve ended up with outlook?
No, it’s how we ended up with proofpoint, mimecast, barracuda and all the other spam filtering services.
No, that’s Microsoft being Microsoft to great effect.
They regularly filter first emails from my self-hosted domain to friends. So clearly they know jack shit and just go overboard on false positives. Google is full of pieces of shit.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126?hl=en
Did you set up SPF and DKIM? It helps Google know you are not a spammer.
I just checked - SPF is set up. I had never heard about DKIM, but I checked, and it’s also enabled. So as I said, google is just full of shiteaters.
They would also filter out a newsletter I signed up to that I actually wanted to read.
A couple years ago I signed up for an email provider so I could use my own domain and avoid Google being able to kill my email account. They’ve got a spam filter, but it’s ridiculously bad. I’ve been looking for better ways, but still haven’t found them.
Ironically, I’m hoping a free locally-run LLM will soon be able to filter emails appropriately. I haven’t seen anyone trying yet, but I’m sure they’re out there.
Protons spam filter is really good in my experience as well, and you can also use your own domain.
The only downside so far imo is that you can’t just add it as an imap or pop3 server to any mail client, you have to use their apps or host their bridge somewhere. Something to do with their e2ee I think.
I think that’s a really good idea, let me know if it works!
Oh, I’m not trying to make it happen. I just think it’s inevitable that someone will. And probably pretty soon.
I get a lot of spam/phishing in one of my Gmail accounts for some reason. They send me PDF attachments with nude pics on them of hot ladies that ostensibly want to meet my penis and stuff. “Click here!” it says on the nude pic PDFs, with links to .ru websites and junk
Wait, you open attachments from spam?
How else would they get to see naked ladies?
No I let Gmail preview the attachment in the browser, without clicking the content inside
Proton
Something bugs me about Proton. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one. It feels like a honeypot or something. Like - I question if it’s going to be around in 10 years. I don’t know what gives me that feeling about them, but I’ve resisted moving over to them completely.
They’ve been around for 10 already. They will be around longer too, given that they’re profitable, which they’ve continued to be. They also aren’t under any legal pressure because they’ve complied with government requests, just with limited data because that’s all the data they store. Their client software, which is where the encryption happens, is all audited and open sourced. Any reason to distrust them would really be baseless right now. At the very least, they are definitely better than Google when it comes to trust…
I don’t think they’re a honeypot, but they do seem like posers. Privacy is just good for marketing now.
They’ve been focused on privacy for 10 years, before it was nearly as marketable.
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No, because Signal is open source and I’ve seen a lot of government agencies complain about it. It’s auditable.
Edit: I was unaware that the proton apps are open source.
I mean, if anybody knows what an ad looks like, it’s Google.
Even Thunderbird has a better spam filter after you train it for a few days.
I am using my mail provider’s standard filter and at most I get 5 mails per week that make it through. And that’s with my mail being publicly available on my personal website. Not sure what sort of sites people sign up for, but spam has never been an issue, even away from Google.
I’ve had 1 spam email get through in like…15 years on Gmail. 5 per week is absolutely atrocious, in my honest opinion.
AT MOST 5 a week and there are also weeks where I receive none at all. Interestingly it always seems to be the same type of spam from different adresses so there is probably a bot net somewhere that has my address and every month or so when the owners start a new wave I get a few and thats it.
On the other hand how many false positives have you had to pick out of the bin?
Maybe 1 every 2 years or so?
So far, Proton has been doing a better job than Google ever did for me. Especially considering that they don’t even read my mail content, that is genuinely impressive to me
That’s the Postini purchase from a ways back. It’s truly amazing.
The Gmail spam filter filters out emails from Google, half the 2FA authentication emails I get, things I’ve actively subscribed to and hit “not spam” on several times, and does not block “You’ve won a Home Depot gift card!” from h3uu3hb382jeop1fe@je7qow.xy
I disagree. Perhaps you need hard evidence for a claim like that.
I have a gmail account, and a proton mail account. My gmail account is packed with spam. It has so much spam its crazy. The account is basically unusable. Which is fine, because I no longer trust google. It’s been years since I’ve told anyone to use this account.
On the other hand, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve got a spam message in my inbox on protonmail. In fact, I remember. It’s 2. The account isn’t as old, but I’ve used it to sign up for at least as many things. It’s my main account now - partially because I’ve turned anti-google, but also because its not choked by mountains of junk.
(To be fair, I suspect the main reason that my gmail account is so bad is that it has a popular username, and other people have accidentally signed up for things with my email accidentally instead of their own. Nevertheless, the fact is that the gmail is spam-central, and the protonmail account is clean.)
Hey’s spam filtering is a thousand times better than Gmail at least nowadays. Mostly because hey is literally built on the premise that you whitelist who you want to get emails from. The rest are blackholed. But the spam filtering is still very good for the approval part of it.