Spam is becoming an increasing problem for me in Gmail, with a few messages sneaking through every day despite the built-in spam filters and my manual ones.
They are overwhelmingly political spam, which I started receiving ever since I donated money to candidates a few years back.
Unfortunately, political messages aren’t covered by CAN-SPAM, and Google doesn’t seem to care about Gmail much anymore. I’m ready to move on.
Is there a hosted email provider with better spam filters, especially custom ones I can hook up to modern technologies like LLMs, or at least ML text classifiers, either by a prompt like “label and block any messages that look like a political request for donations” or by some sort of API or webhook? I would be happy to pay up to $10-$20/mo for something like this, and I’m ready to give up my Gmail address. I only get like 4-5 human messages there a year anyway; the rest is just automated transactional emails.
I really don’t want to host my own email server if it can be avoided… I just want something simple and spam-free, with minimal maintenance on my part. I considered writing my own filter engine using the Gmail API, but it’s still more work than I’d like to do for this…
Or maybe I should just move to a provider that provides one-time-use email aliases (like Fastmail’s masked emails), and only give those out from now on? That still doesn’t seem very foolproof, since I’d presumably still give the humans in my life my “real” address, and inevitably one of them will purposefully or accidentally share it and it’s only a matter of time before that gets harvested and spammed too.
Personally, I do most of my filtering in my email client, not on the server. I use Thunderbird, which allows you create an unlimited number of filters that detect spam based on the sender address, subject line, keywords in the body, etc. You can choose what to do with detected emails: delete them, move them to a specific folder, etc. I don’t use a gmail account, but I’m pretty sure that gmail supports IMAP, so you should be able to keep your gmail address and use Thunderbird as your client.
Gmail also supports simple keyword filters, but unfortunately they are not really powerful enough to filter out some of this spam, at least not without also possibly filtering out real emails about similar topics (eg differentiating between a convo about politics vs a candidate’s donation request).
I use gmail and hardly get any spam. But, I am diligent about unsubscribing from any that somehow manage to get thru. I am not sure if that is the reason for my low spam count, but I occasionally scrub my wife and my’s shared email the same way - and there is a ton more spam there (yahoo email), mainly because she is less diligent about eliminating spam. It seems to work in my case, but have you tried unsubscribing from spam email?
I recently started using Klart’s AI Label Assistant with Gmail and it’s moderately useful. You can override its label choices and it learns how better to apply labels according to your wishes, but I do sometimes wish I could more directly instruct the AI assistant on what I want. It does seem to be getting better, though, and, combined with Gmail’s multiple inboxes, I’ve reached approximately what I want for an AI email sorter. If it doesn’t last, my next step is a custom n8n solution, but I don’t feel like putting in that much work if I can avoid it.
Unfortunately, yes, I already do that routinely. That works for a lot of spam, but these political ones are tricky because they are expressly allowed by law and don’t have to abide by the normal “report as spam” procedures.
What I suspected happened was that following my donations (several thousand dollars spread across a few candidates), NGPVan harvested my personal info either from the campaigns themselves or just from FEC public records. Then all that gets shared with every other blue candidate all across the country. I’ve gotten tens of thousands of these emails over the years, from candidates and areas I’ve never even heard of. They all get marked as spam but they just keep coming. Once my email is out there as a high-value mark, there’s no stopping the deluge because every one of them is from a different candidate (none of them get through twice once I block them).
My Pixel phone uses AI to block similar texts and calls, and it is VERY good at that. I switched to iPhone for a month and couldn’t live with the constant flood of texts and calls and had to switch back. Gmail, unfortunately, is similarly bad at filtering them out.
I suspect the only way to stop this is to give up my email address and start a new one, which I’m willing to do. I just don’t want this to happen again with the new one too.
Huh, it only labels, but won’t move things to spam or delete them for you? I can live with a few false positives… I’m tired of having to manually block things.
Now this is interesting. I’d never heard of this. It’s like a Zapier or Make.com with AI integrations? Cool, might have to try it.
I’m thinking of making a workflow that identifies incoming political donation requests, looks up their opposition in that election, and then donates to their enemy instead. It’ll then write back with a message like “Hello. Because you sent this unsolicited spam, I sent your opposition candidate _____ $1 in your honor. If you send any further messages, the next donation to your opponent will be even higher. Please remove me from all your mailing lists and never contact me again.”
Or, you know, maybe a less obnoxious thing to do would be to just send a fake “address not found” bounceback. I dunno if Gmail will let me fake headers like that though.
Gmail is my main email client and I don’t have this problem, so I don’t as surprised. Until I realized why: I do have my own (virtual) email server, and several years ago added global email filters on the server (via decent UI tools) that kill 99% of it; the Gmail client never sees it.
I know you’ve mentioned it’s not what you want; but it certainly does work very well. It’s hard for me to assess a cost, as I rent an entire virtual server and host multiple domains.