In my case, I moved to Fastmail... and yeah, the hilarious thing is people remember moving from AOL to Gmail over a decade ago, and think Gmail is still so much better than everything else.
Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with any modern alternative offering.
I admit I don't have a lot to compare between, but my company switched from Rackspace mail a couple years ago because of the unrelenting spam and seemingly no way to stop it. I suggested Google because I hardly ever see any spam there in my personal account, so we made the switch.
The difference is night and day. I can look in the spam folder for my work email now and there are hundreds of spam messages there for the last 30 days, and absolutely zero false positives. I have seen a handful of spam messages come through, but it's in the single digits over the last two years.
I believe you, but there is still the usual dark side that has been mentioned maaany times here: very often emails sent by small/tiny email providers aren't delivered at all to Gmail receivers.
That's often the case with one of my friends who has a Gmail email address: anything that I send him (once or twice a year) doesn't even show up in his spam list without first making him start an email exchange to me => in my opinion that kind of filtering is just too easy to do (come on Google, at least put it into the spam folder and/or show it as a colored/blinking line and/or put some warnings whatever - don't just delete it), and of course it poses questions about oligopoly etc. How Gmail works is just not fair (in my opinion) :(((
Silently dropping mail is something that should just not be tolerated. We need to enforce that email providers either deliver something (to the inbox or spam folder) or reject the mail at submission time - with legislation if needed.
I tried switching to Fastmail (from Gmail) 7-ish yrs ago, and I ended up switching back to Gmail specifically because the spam filtering was far worse with Fastmail. Is it Fastmail's spam filtering actually better now, or does it just seem that way when you start a new account because you're not getting much spam in general?
Another anecdote - I switched earlier this year (prompted because of the ending of my grandfathered Gapps account, but my experiences are largely with the "standard" Gmail account vs. Fastmail).
Spam filtering on Fastmail has been the same/better than Gmail was - including possibly fewer false-positives on the Fastmail side. Gmail was getting worse about those, both with mailing lists and individuals' emails.
Like many on HN, I'm diversifying my data/access risk across more providers. Too many wake-up calls recently about Google locking people out. There are still some services Google is compellingly better enough that I still use them (Android, Maps, YouTube, Google Sheets), but Email was too precious to tie up with them. I also wanted to finally kick myself into stoping using the `gmail.com` address at all anymore (maybe 20% of my emails before the migration).
So, I moved to Fastmail in 2016, and I'd say I've never had to get a legitimate email out of my spam folder, and I've never seen obvious spam hit my inbox. I do occasionally get the "my husband left me five mil overseas" type garbage, it's always spam-binned correctly. (Meanwhile, my Gmail account I retain in case someone tries to reach out to it, regularly has emoji-subject-filled spam and other garbage Gmail fails to classify, and also has a deluge of garbage spam coming in... at this point, Gmail is 98% spam for me?)
One important point here, and I don't know how long you used Fastmail when you tried it, is that Fastmail uses a personalized spam filter. It probably took me six to eight months to receive enough spam on Fastmail to actually train it. (In the interim, they use a non-personalized filter, which as I said, still worked!) Gmail doesn't seem to be able to make personal spam decisions: When I was regularly using Gmail, some types of regular messages would spam-bin no matter how many times I marked them not spam or classified them as a particular category of mail.
Many people consider Gmail as consenting to spyware. Unfortunately, lots of people don't know any better or haven't bothered to take a good look at the account settings or Google's policies.
Anybody that knows better, will avoid Gmail like the plague or use it for only the minimum.
That's so true. Switched to Mailfence recently. I still can't get used to it that whenever I click on something, the action gets done immediately. Its web/mobile client is a bit limited but crazy fast.
Gmail is worst-in-class at this point. It's slow, it's bloated, it's bad at spam filtering compared to the alternatives. They've been riding on people remembering email before Gmail, but not really actually stayed competitive with any modern alternative offering.