> perhaps 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month

That's 4-6 valid messages a month the average user will never see.

Your mileage will vary I guess. It has been _years_ since I got a legit message caught in gmail spam; every few months I glance at it and go "yup, that's all spam." Proofpoint however, they capture a legit email every other month or so.

I just checked and I missed an important message by somebody I had been on a thread with because gmail thinks it is spam.

Because of that I just added a recurring remainder to go through gmails spam folder every sunday, but that of course defeats the purpose.

Gmail also thinks that every 2fa message from Microsoft is spam for some reason, despite how often I tell it is is not.

I disagree, I think "check your spam" is fairly widely understood.

I think the fact that “check your spam” is so widely understood is a testament to false positives in the inbox being an issue for Gmail.

Ideally this phrase would not be so widely known and understood if Gmail didn’t have so many false positives going to the spam folder. I’d imagine that, as a performance metric, the Gmail team would consider false positives to be a metric for improvement, not a metric of pride.

GGP's point is that in some circumstances, Gmail will simply disappear emails, with no trace, instead of quarantining them.

Who has time for that when your spam folder is full of hundreds of junk messages per day?

It is not.

Today I checked my spam folder for the first time in months, thanks to having read this thread.

Low and behold there was an email in there that was fairly important.

little value in a single number like this, it would be better to give a percentage wrt monthly incoming mails... 4-6 seems true to me but I subscribed to way too many mailing lists and the false positives basically always come from them

> 4-6 false positives in the spam folder a month.

That seems like a lot; with FastMail I get basically 0. The last time this happened was years ago.

I do get the very occasional spam, maybe 5 messages/month or so. Most of them are from marketing agencies that want to "collaborate" on my website or some such and have a spam score of 0 or close to it, and arguably isn't "spam" in the same way as "grow a bigger dick!"-spam is. I doubt gmail would catch those too.

With Fastmail I get a lot of messages purporting to be from Fastmail threatening account termination/verification, something along those lines. Most of them are automatically sent to spam.

Interesting; I can't recall ever seeing anything like that.

I don’t have this problem with the mail server that I set up for myself. It works as intended. My Gmail account, that I maintain mainly for email lists, gets tons of false spam positives, however. Gmail is garbage.