I probably don’t sing the praises of software enough, no probably about it, I definately don't!
Some software is awful. Some is bloated, overcomplicated, and seems to exist mainly to make simple jobs harder. But every now and then you find something that quietly does exactly what you need it to do.
FairEmail has been one of those for me.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been getting around 100 spam emails a day landing in my inbox. Not my spam folder. My actual inbox.
Some of them were painfully obvious. Sender names like “C0stc0”, “0maha Steaks”, and every strange variation in between. The sort of thing you’d look at for half a second and know straight away it wasn’t right.
But technically, they must have been well put together, because they were getting through Heart Internet’s SpamAssassin filters with a spam score of around 1.3. Their spam recognition target at the time was 2, so these emails were being treated as fine.
They clearly weren’t.
I wanted to get it sorted quickly, so I downloaded FairEmail. It took a little bit of getting used to, but once I understood how it worked, it made the whole problem much easier to manage.
I could permanently delete spam emails with very little effort. No dragging things around. No fiddling. No repeatedly seeing the same rubbish sitting there, annoying me. That alone was enough to make me feel a bit more in control of the inbox again.
I was so pleased with it that I paid the £6.99 for the Pro features. Not because I had to, but because it had already proved useful enough to be worth paying for.
Once I’d got the spam under better control on my side, I contacted Heart Internet as well. To be fair to them, they looked into it and I think they were a little surprised that so many emails were being flagged as fine when, to any normal person, they obviously weren’t.
They then made some changes across their eight email servers and it worked.
The number of spam emails getting through to my spam folder dropped by around 75%. That is a massive improvement, especially when it had been feeling like a daily battle just to keep on top of it.
Now, with Heart Internet filtering things better and FairEmail helping me deal with the few that still slip through, I might get one or two spam emails reaching my inbox each day.
That’s fine. I can live with that.
It’s easy to complain when software or services don’t work properly. I’ve done plenty of that. But it’s also worth saying when something does work.
In this case, FairEmail did its job, Heart Internet responded properly, and my inbox is usable again.
That feels like a cracking win to me.
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