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I started running my own email server around 2014. I am using every mitigation I can find, but I still get an unending torrent of spam that slips through. If t
by Torgo 9y ago
I started running my own email server around 2014. I am using every mitigation I can find, but I still get an unending torrent of spam that slips through.
If tweaking spam filters and deleting spam is your idea of fun, then run your own email server.
- dmm 9y agoFWIW, I've run my own mail server for 10 years and I hardly ever receive spam, maybe 1-2 a week. And I give out my email everywhere. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and blacklisting.
- viperscape 9y agoWhat do you use for the mail server? Do you do any sort of backups or failover? Just curious
- dmm 9y agoI run exim on Debian stable. I use greylistd for greylisting and dovecot for imap. I backup emails daily by taking a btrfs snapshot and rsyncing it to my home server, which I have a regular backup cycle for. If you were really worried you could setup exim to forward every email to a backup server. Failover is manual. I would create a new vm, install debian stable and run a script I've prepared a script that installs packages, copies config files and creates users. Downtime with email is not a big deal, servers will retrying sending for a few days. If you have users complaining to you it's obviously a bigger deal.
- twothamendment 9y agoI've been running since 2001. There were some rough years in there with spam and big providers rejecting for no good reason. Now it has been years since I've had any delivery issues. As for spam, I get 2-3 a week that make it through, but I don't make any effort to tweak it. Thanks for bringing up the painful memories of adding new filters each night. So glad those days are over for me.
- igammarays 9y agoBig providers probably rejected you in the early days because you were an unknown sender back then.
- fmos 9y agoFor me, rspamd with corresponding exim-acls practically solved that issue since 02/2016. Spam is mostly rejected, otherwise tagged (and filtered with dovecot-sieve downstream into a review-box) or - if borderline - greylisted. Have had no false positives I'm aware of and only 1-2 false negatives per week slip through that cascade. edit: Although some training (i.e. manually moving spam to IMAP-Junk) was necessary during the first few months.
- apple4ever 9y agoSpamassassin plus DNSBL works great for me. Before I enabled that, I would get 100+ spam emails a day. Now I barely get one a month.
- bluedino 9y agoOur mail server is hosted with BIG_HOSTING_COMPANY and we still get shittons of spam
- dboreham 9y agoIt could be worse : the spam filter you have no control over and no insight into what it is up to can vaporize that important new customer lead email that was going to make you $$$
- BenjiWiebe 9y agoI don't do spam filtering on my server, but I use Thunderbird and it's filter takes care of 99% of the spam.
- sliken 9y agoInstall the current spamassassin and turn on greylisting should get rid of 99%. Then I'd block the spam only domains like .click, .link, .party, .top, .webcam, .xyz, and .stream. That should be enough to get you close to zero, sure having spamassin learn based on your Junk folder will help improve things. I've run a mail server for 20+ years and never had a spam issue, periodically I do updates spam assassin of course.
- KeepFlying 9y agoYou feel comfortable blocking entire TLDs like that? I understand they send a lot of spam, but what about valid emails from those TLDs?