I was quite surprised how much better search and spam filters are on fastmail. Both things I did not believe a small company could do better than Google, but I think they did.
I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.
Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.
I personally find Fastmail's spam handling a lot worse than GMail's: and I get a lot more spam in my GMail address, due to it being a 22 year old address, which I still use for initial sign-ups, before then changing account emails to my fastmail one after a few months.
Very likely a lot of the difference is the types of email each address is getting.
I am not a Fastmail user but I completely doubt this. I have been using Gmail for 20 years and I have never seen a spam mail land in my inbox which has always impressed me. Everything else I have used from time to time does miss a few, which I guess it might be acceptable if you want to move to another host.
There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.
(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)
Create a rule that moves messages with real email address to spam where they are deleted as soon as needed, then create tmp2026 alias to serve as your new default email address.
I also find the interface better. I was also expecting Google to have resources for optimizing details, that a small company wouldn't get around to.
Fastmail also lets you e-mail a real person for help and they usually take it very seriously - e.g, they go look at logs before following up.