Why dont you use their masked/alternate addresses. That was one of the primary selling points for me. Any questionable site/service gets its own address and is easily removed or filtered if spam starts showing up.

I have those too. But the problem is I migrated away from GMail, where everything worked even with 1 email address, so now I'm stuck with that email address being used by all the people and companies that want to send me email.

(By the way, in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails; this is quite handy, but after migrating to Fastmail this is leaving me with quite a mess in my Inbox, since Fastmail doesn't have this option).

>in GMail you can move emails to "promotional" and "social" folders, and then GMail automatically does that for you for future emails

It's not quite as elegant, but you can create a rule from an existing email in the mail options. It will try to guess at the best set of filters to match that type of email (and obviously you can refine that manually if needed), so you can send those types of mails to a Marketing folder.

You're not stuck; slowly change addresses with the different companies, people, etc. I did it over the course of a few years without hassle. If you spend $10/year for your own domain, then you can use a catchall, and if you ever decide to leave Fast ail for another provider, you don't have to change all the addreses again.

The fact that it requires slowly changing over years is a sign of getting stuck no? We can theoretically slowly migrate anything. But when effort > X, we consider it being stuck.

That only works with something you actually signed up for. When your email gets leaked in a database and sold a thousand times you just start getting spam for all types of things.

My solution was to start over with a new "root" email address and then keep it private. Having unique email addresses for each service (which then forwards to the "root" email address) is a bit of a pain but it does work for spam and, depending on what else you share with the service, privacy as well.

For better or worse if you want to reliably control who you receive email from you need to control who knows your email addresses and have the ability to disable/filter them.

the same is true for SMS/call spam - my phone number is a single digit off from my wife's, she gets 6-10 total spam messages and calls a day, i get one a year. It's because she uses her cellphone number to sign up for fuel rewards and stuff, and they immediately sell it. I use my voip number to sign up for anything, and i have notifications shut off for SMS - and a phone tree for calls. Spam calls never get through a phone tree/IVR.

My experience on fastmail doesn't align with yours. While spam has slightly increased over the years, I attribute that to just using my email more often. It's very rare that I get spam in my actual inbox. In fact, my experience is that the spam filter is a bit too strong and I actually have to check the spam folder now and then.

For the promotional emails, there are some general rules you can set up to catch a lot of it, such as https://pietrorea.com/2021/10/22/filter-emails-by-the-list-u.... However, the best way to manage them is to actually just unsubscribe to them as you receive them. If unsubscribe is ignored, then blacklist the sender.

For general spam, there's a setting under "privacy and security" to make the filtering more or less aggressive. My setting is on "standard" and I haven't had any problems, but you could try adjusting that.

OK, I will try that.

But I still think migrating away from GMail should be less painful.

I'm using the Hey approach in Fastmail, so my main folders are Inbox and Screener, with a filter like this:

Matches NOT fromin:contacts -> Move to Screener

I'll check the Screener less frequently, and whenever I feel like it I'll take a message from it and use Actions -> Add rule from message.. and send messages from that sender to a Newsletter folder.

I still get lots of crap in the Screener, but then again I don't really use e-mail to communicate with humans, so in a sense all e-mail is automated nonsense from systems where I have some kind of user account.

Here's one little-known tip I learned from Fastmail support some time ago: it's only possible to train the spam filter using their Web UI. If you're using a 3rd-party client, simply moving messages to your spam folder will have no effect on your filter quality. So to truly flag a message as spam, you must switch to your browser, login to FM, and handle it from there.

But I don't want to mark everything that should not grab my immediate attention as spam.

Some stuff like promotions or social messages deserve their own folder. Google did this right.

Google does it right because they don't respect your privacy.

They have millions of users and they use aggregated data from all of them to manage the automatic categories.

spam as in unsolicited? I get 0 in any of my inboxes. I get lots of stuff i don't care about from spammy businesses (E Y E GL A S S // S A L E 80% O FF) that i've used before. But there's a way around that as well, it's more expensive. Buy a domain name. Set up DNS. Let fastmail host the actual mail service. Set up a catchall account *@domain.tld. Give per-site/whatever emails whenever you give an email.

If the email gets sold, just tell the fastmail UI that everything sent to that address is spam. It hasn't failed yet, and i've been using fastmail since it was $5/year. It's $15/yr now and they recently doubled my storage from 500mb to 1000mb!

Promotional mails you've subscribed to aren't spam, just add a rule and label them "Ads" and click the "Archive (skip inbox)"

That's what I've been doing and my inbox is pretty much empty from useless stuff.

In the spam protection settings, you can choose a protection level of off, standard, aggressive or custom. I choose custom.

Then, I send everything with a score of 5 or more to spam.

I don't delete any spam.

And I mark it all as read.

That cuts down on spam drastically in my inbox while still retaining it all in the spam folder should any legit email end up there.