This last week, gmail failed to filter as spam an email with subject "#T Anitra", body,

> oF1 d 4440 - 2 B 32677 83

> R Teri E x E q

>

> k 50347733 Safoorabegum

and an attachment "7330757559.pdf". It let through 8 similar emails in the same week, and many more even more egregiously gibberish emails over the years. I'm not pleased with the quality of gmail's spam filter.

I moved to FastMail three years ago, and, for a contrasting experience, found that spam filtering was almost on a par with Gmail. I had feared it would be otherwise.

my inbox at fastmail is near empty from spam. the main spam i see in my inbox is forwarded from my gmail.

That probably says more about the email address that’s out there than anything else.

Fastmail has wildcard email support, so it’s pretty easy to have an email per purchase you make (for example). This makes it easy to see who leaked your email to spammers. Anyway, I have nowhere near the volume of spam with Fastmail that I had with Gmail.

My point was not about wildcard emails, which Gmail also offers. Rather, the amount of spam you get is typically based on how well known your email address is to spammers. If someone’s not getting much spam, it usually just means they haven’t used their email address in places where they would get it. This is regardless of whether it’s a wildcard email or not.

Your comment is confusing because you start this one saying your inbox is full of spam, but respond to a suggestion to mark it as spam by saying it's not actually spam.

If something is not spam but you want it out of your inbox there's a few options:

- click Unsubscribe next to the sender. This should be possible for essentially all promotional email.

- click Actions -> click Block <sender>. Messages from this address will now immediately go to trash.

- click Actions -> click Add rule from message (-> optionally change the suggested conditions) -> check Archive (or if you don't use labels click Move to) -> click Save. Messages matching the conditions will now skip your inbox.

There's not much they could do to make that easier without magically knowing what you care about and what you don't.

I guess what's confusing is that I'm calling the promotional emails also "spam".

But thanks for your suggestions.

I see a few problems. When I receive a promotional email, I want to add a rule, and I have to click 7 times (including once for "Archive"), and use the scroll-wheel to select the "Promotions" label. Secondly, the rule is not applied directly. This is confusing, and cumbersome. Note: I don't want to Unsubscribe (because there may be vouchers), and I don't want to mark it as spam, for the same reason.

Another problem is that the amount of rules gets unwieldy this way. I have hundreds of rules already for promotional stuff and the rules I use for other (more important) stuff are hidden between them.

Maybe you think I am complaining too much, but in gmail it was all simple and automatic.

One rule that may be good, depending on how much of the mailing list email you receive is promotional, is to match "A header called List-Unsubscribe exists" and move that to Promotional. Then you could put any exceptions that it categorizes wrong above it.

That's a good idea. Although, oddly, some of the emails that have an Unsubscribe button have no List-Unsubscribe header.

How would you suggest to solve the following problem: let's say I have archived all my mail (inbox zero); how do I now see the emails that are important to me (i.e., everything that was not labeled e.g. with promotions)?

Gmail puts most of my email in the spam folder, including a lot of non-spam. Manually labeling it as non-spam is not helping.

Never had that after the first few years, but I hear other people do have that. Maybe it's because I used it for 2 decades now? I tried alternatives including fastmail but I always leave them because I get swamped by spam while gmail works fine.

There is a "Report Spam" function which is two clicks away (it's in the "More" menu).

I don't want to report everything as spam. For example, promotional emails from businesses that I bought something from. I don't want to punish those businesses; and those emails might contain vouchers that I could use later. But I want those emails moved out of the way without any action from my side.

That's like Spotify telling me "keep disliking" when I complained to them why songs from a certain language (which I never liked or listened to and I certainly don't speak) keeps filling the home after I told them in the first complaint that I have been doing that since months.

What can I say, "Report Spam" seems to work for me. I'm just a customer of Fastmail.

If you meet someone new at a social event and give them your email address, where do you want your email provider to put the message that this person sent?

I get no spam on fastmail, I assume this is because I never give out my email to anyone and creating new ones for every interaction. This way I keep track of who I'm interacting with and also who's selling my alias emails.

Just wish there was a decent way to do this with mobile numbers!

Same, I religiously create a masked email for every website (just checked, it's now at 163!). I simply don't give my "main" email out.

Oddly enough, simply unsubscribing from the things websites themselves has kept thing clean, I've yet to notice any true spam from a random source aimed at any of my emails since I joined last year.