It used to have, but I would say it's been getting worse. The number of false positives is definetly going up and I would argue that that already gives us an indication of how important Google sees email. If they would consider email a channel that carries imporrtant information they would optimise to reduce false positives not minimise false negatives.
Gmail is subject to specific targeting by spammers in a way that fastmail is not. The returns for spending weeks or months finding a niche way through Gmail's filters are justified by the number of gmail addresses that can be targeted, which is probably 3 orders of magnitude larger than the total number of fastmail subscribers.
Are they the same target email address though? If not, surely that's not a fair test if the gmail account has been around for 10+ years or so?
(I have the same situation, an 18-year old gmail account and a 6 year old fastmail account, but the reason I don't get ANY spam at all in the fastmail account is I only use it for certain things and it's much newer, so I'd argue at least in my case, that's not a fair comparison).
I was on fastmail for about a year. It didn't filter nearly as much, and Fastmail as a service was constantly experiencing outages. Pretty much weekly. I would say it's an almost unanimously inferior service.
I did use it during that period (and still do). I've never seen an outage. Are they regional outages? Or do I just go to bed at the right time to consistently avoid them?
But the spam filter isn't as good as Google's, 100% agree with that.
Sounds like some super weird, extremely local issue. And yes, I’ve been using it as main mail account for (after checking) almost 9 years now, so that includes that period.
Not an entire year. It was 2-3 day outages, weekly, for quite a while. I've been trying to find the tweets, but as Elon took away tweet searching it's been a challenge to go that far back
edit I remember they were open about experiencing a denial of service attack over several weeks.
The same tech works in both directions. Spammer creates 1000 email variants using a LLM, spam filter collapses those 1000 variants back into easily classifiable embeddings
In the end it's content that matters, not the form that it's send to - I don't care if it's my grandma sending me offers for viagra pills, or a spammer, and I don't care about the language either - I just don't want to get such offers.
On the other hand, if there is an e-mail that may be interesting to me, I don't care if it was sent by a human, or by a machine - I want to see it in my inbox.
In other words - it's not about distinguishing human/machine written text. It's about distinguishing content that is worthwhile for me from the one that isn't.
I wonder though, with the advent of new LLM models, it should now be trivially possible to build a zero-shot spam-filtering bot that is self hosted.