I recently switched over 6 gmail accounts (both personal and business) from gmail to fastmail. I have been suddenly bombarded with a mountain of spam that the goog must have been catching. It doesn't seem like my constant flagging is doing anything. I ended up building a convoluted mess of filters that will probably cause me to misflag something important one day. :-/

Also, I really miss the auto categorization into primary, promotions, social and updates. This is a killer feature!

I'm happy to be rid of the goog's convoluted management console, but wondering why fastmail's spam filters aren't up to snuff...

Interestingly, I have found it the other way around for me. While my main inbox is at Fastmail, I also have a historical Gmail account. My Fastmail inbox gets a few spam messages week. My Gmail account on the other hand gets hundreds a month (if not weekly) that slip past the google filters.

This is mainly why I stopped forwarding emails from Gmail to Fastmail as >95% of the spam was sent via Gmail, and I suspect Fastmail doesn't try to filter those.

Anyway, a helpful tip for you is that the Fastmail spam filter is configurable. You may want to look at making it more aggressive. Go to Fastmail > Settings > Filters & Rules > Filters > Spam protection > Advanced settings. Here you can either just select the 'Aggressive' preset or even customise your own thresholds for flagging a message as spam. Here you can also check how many messages are have been learnt by the filters.

If you're forwarding emails from Gmail I'd also suggest turning that off or setting up a rule to dump the Gmail forwarded messages into a separate folder. I suspect you'll find most of the spam has been passed on by Gmail.

Thank you for this report - I tried leaving gmail 2 years ago and returned quickly exactly because of this. Sad to hear the situation remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, on my other account, I have hacked together a basic email classification with n8n and cheap LLM model, and it works awesomely and costs peanuts. I wonder why services who want to be google's competitors don't do this?

Google just has an order of magnitude or three more data to work with.

It's exceedingly difficult to compete against "free".

I made a preliminary attempt as well and had the same experience. I hope to renew with a better success.