Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server and those who could would be spending a lot of time training the blocker which those using Google never even needed to think of.

Public organizational emails in orgs I've been a part of (e.g. [email protected], [email protected]) get a little more spam, largely sales pitches from what appears to be actual humans at shady SEO companies. Maybe 2 a week.

I get way more "legitimate" corporate spam than actual unprompted/cold spam. The most egregious example in recent memory was when I made an online purchase at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and made sure the "sign me up for the email list" checkbox was not selected. They sent me no fewer than four emails asking if I would like to sign up for their email list, including one titled, "Thanks for signing up for our email list!" (inside: "Just take this one last step to confirm your subscription <signup link>").

In conclusion, I perceive unwanted email to be largely a self-inflicted problem at present. For example, someone I know likes to complain about the quantity of email she receives, but also refuses to unsubscribe, because sometimes she sees something interesting in one of the many promotional lists she's on. I also don't understand people who say they're not bothered by advertising, but to each her own.

I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

Everyone else had to up their game due to Gmail. On all fronts.

meanwhile tons of spam (crypto related) is marked as spam, without that it'd be pain enter my mailbox

Obviously a personal anecdote, but I signed up for Gmail close to when it first came out, and I don't think I've ever had a legitimate piece of mail marked as spam.

I remember people clamoring to sign up for Gmail because it was the new thing, it had the counter that kept going up with "a lot" of storage space, etc. Folks were even paying others for a Gmail invite.

This, definitely. Take a look at gmail spam folder, it's always full of false positives.

I think that’s “especially as”. Other mail providers are competition, after all.

A slightly more problematic is targeted phishing attacks, where the attackers try to put at least some work-relevant information “. Some of those attempts are not so trivial. I do receive them few times per year, while with GMail I do not remember getting one in at least a year. But on other hand I am not so sure that Google will defend against those if we have used GMail at work.

I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.

I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.

Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.

You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.

I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.

> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well

Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.

These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.

I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.

Google somehow wants to force me to not use my email server. Fuck them

It you don't have dmarc enabled that is for sure worth doing too.

It does mean your traffic is centralized through a data center, but it probably goes through one already...

Also you're incredibly alienated if you think a "normal person" could manage their own mailserver. 95%+ of western people couldn't use a CLI.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good

How can these two sentences be true at the same time?

Spam filtering is very hard. Therefore there are some content based rules and some sender based rules. Google is very good at both of those, which means in this context means accuracy and precision based on content and strictness based on sender. Sender based rules make it hard for spammers to send mail pretending to be from a domain, but does make it harder for anyone to send mail. Hosting your own mail server means hosting the authorization architecture to prove you're not a spammer, which makes it harder.

No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com

Except for, oh, I don't know, maybe https://mail.com/ ?

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the implementation however was much better than hotmail or any other web-based email at the time.

To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.

gmail became a brand nearly immediately via initial scarcity of invitations. Hotmail and yahoo mail sounded like idiotic kid email addresses. Webmail never tried doing email. Pobox.com did only forwarding and was too linked to the physical mail in the mind of people. Same went for mailboxes.com.

> To argue the name was the important aspect is to argue marketing is more important than the quality of what is being marketed, an idea that HN is generally not very open to.

Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

yes, to us (the techies), but there are billions of people in the world who didn't know who or what gmail was for a at least 4-5 years. I specifically made the observation of geemail sounding like email because I had that experienced less than a decade ago giving the address to a dentist's secretary in Denmark.

>Yet the only successful companies are the companies with great marketing and an OK ( or more product ).

first of all I'd say Google had a great product and ok marketing for a few years, nowadays they have great marketing, an ok product, and built in market dominance.

So I suppose I can accept that good marketing is a prerequisite but not sufficient.

That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.

And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?

I would say you have to look at the alternative names - hotmail? yahoo.com? gmail sounds like a fantastic choice.

> That said what do you mean by successful? I mean great marketing being required for successful makes you think that the only successful companies can be ones you've heard of, because how successful can a company be that you've never heard of.

Your target customers know who you are.

> And on that note when I tell people I used to work for Thomson Reuters and nobody knows who that is I suppose this means Thomson Reuters is not a successful company?

Random people are not customers of Thomson Reuters and Thompson Reuters is not in a market of converting them. Those that consume news content as a part of their product know who Thompson Reuters is.

I guess if that is the requirement I would say adequate marketing is required to succeed.

It is not about centralization but about one player winning and beating the competition in that case.

Her actual conclusion is that in order to create a market whose average members are free, we need more regulation.

In the olden days, any business could say in good faith "I want to offer email services" and they would have been treated pretty much the same as any other good faith provider of email service. But today, a business who wanted to start up an email service is insane; just check out the nearby thread of a person who replaced Mailchimp with a semi-self-rolled service. As a matter of fact, no matter what the RFCs say, people in the industry do not treat email as decentralised.

This is partially because people joined the network in bad faith, but it's also because a small number of large nodes are able to assume anyone who isn't known to them is acting in bad faith and therefore force people towards the larger nodes.

As I said before, email and the web continue to be usable in a decentralised fashion, but to do so involves wearing a hairshirt. This is the failure of decentralised applications. The author of the article has a view that is closer to "the market is only as free as its weaker members" rather than the view more fashionable hereabouts "the market is only as free as its stronger members", which leads to a different conclusion. It would probably lead to more insightful disagreements to discuss this underlying difference rather than arguing about what technologies email is less centralised than. (Edit to clairfy: These things in quotation marks are not quotes. The quotation marks are used to help delimit the propositions.)