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> Gmail, which has world-class spam filtering.

If by world class you mean huge amounts of false positives and destroying the ability for people to send messages reliably between one another, then yes. It's totally world class .. a world class failure.




As they say, Works For Me. Admittedly, I don't know how many important emails I've lost over the years, but I don't remember ever being contacted elsewhere about an email that turned out to be in spam. I have a bad memory so I might be forgetting some instance, but if so it must not have been terribly important, or I'd remember it… On the flipside, there have almost never been any false negatives. I remember being quite annoyed a while back when there was a brief period where a trickle of spam got through. Other than that, I've been spam-free.

(I also remember being IMed by spambots using XMPP federation a few times.)

This does come at the cost of letting Google see all my email. I'm not happy about that, but I'm skeptical that a fully encrypted solution could provide filtering as effective. Certainly a self-hosted solution cannot.


Are there any objective looks at this? I know personally I manually check the spam folder, and out of the hundreds of messages a month that end up there I've never seen anything important get mis-categorised. A few (<<1%) mass emails end up there inadvertently, but nothing that I would notice if I didn't check.




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