9 ms·

I'd strongly recommend against it. In a past life I ran email services for a small business, and then a medium business, it was a full time job, just keeping u

I'd strongly recommend against it. In a past life I ran email services for a small business, and then a medium business, it was a full time job, just keeping us out of the spam blacklists, keeping things patched up, ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) and filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts. If people want to setup email for educational reasons, go ahead, but running one over a longer period isn't wise and frankly many wouldn't put enough time and effort into it to do it well. It is absolutely not set and forget, you'll need to baby it daily indefinitely. When people ask me what I recommend? I tell them outsource email to a major provider and use your limited time/effort elsewhere. Better rate of return by far.

yani 8y ago
I keep hearing the same over and over from sysadmins. Is this too difficult to automate?
- jwr 8y ago
  Ask an architect if it's difficult to build a house, and he'll scare you with tales of complexity. But that doesn't mean you can't build a shed yourself. It can't be completely automated, but it isn't as difficult or time-consuming as people paint it to be (especially sysadmins!). I've been doing it for nearly 18 years now, maintenance takes perhaps 30 minutes every 2 months or so. There is more to do every 8 years or so, as Linux distributions go out of date, and your providers sometimes go out of business. I have my suspicions as to all the FUD regarding running your own E-mail server. Secure personal E-mail distributed on many independent servers with automatic in-transit encryption is not in everyone's interest.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
> It is absolutely not set and forget, you'll need to baby it daily indefinitely. That sounds like you were doing something very fundamentally very wrong. I definitely don't need to touch my mail server daily, nor any of the mail servers I manage for others. It's just doing its job, security updates get installed automatically, and every few years I need to do a debian upgrade, and possibly deploy some new security/anti-spam features. In between those upgrades, it's running unattended for many months with absolutely no problems. On average, I touch my mail server maybe once a year.
- sneak 8y ago
  I can second this, but it’s a full 8 hour day once per year when some spamassassin or amavis config breaks in an update... not to mention the normal sysadmin stuff of backups, verifying backups, logging, monitoring, et c. It’s a big project to run a mailserver. (Source: been doing so for 21 years.)
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    Well, you also need backups with a "cloud" solution, so that's no difference. As for monitoring: If you only run it for yourself or a small org, really, you can do just fine without monitoring. If the mail access side breaks, you'll notice, if the inbound side breaks, you'll probably also notice soon enough. But then, setting up a minimal monit that tells you when storage runs low or the MX is down really isn't that difficult either. So, no, it's not a big project. It's as much of a big project as owning a car, probably less so, if you consider the amount of effort/time required (assuming you have an IT background, obviously).
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  I also managed email for a living and helped transition many enterprises to cloud email solutions. It’s quite likely that other, unauthorized folks, are touching your mail system more frequently than you with such a lax attitude. Definitely outsource your email unless you want the experience. If you want security it seems reasonable to use ProtonMail.com instead of larger cloud providers like Google or Microsoft.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    "It’s quite likely that other, unauthorized folks, are touching your mail system more frequently than you with such a lax attitude." This is complete nonsense. I cannot imagine that there is anything particularly magical that requires something other than regular security updates on any server. Manual intervention is borne of changing requirements or broken things. Why should an email server for a handful of users require a lot of manual intervention?
  - 8y ago
anonytrary 8y ago
> keeping us out of the spam blacklists, keeping things patched up, ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) and filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts It is so easy to forget how much noise and junk gets passed around via email when I've had Google doing it for me for all these years...
zatkin 8y ago
Having a lesser known TLD (.gd) helps in my case. I get spam email once in a blue moon.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I believe most of the spam comes from your email address being leaked by a company or website. Not sure how what your TLD is has anything to do with it.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    I would guess it makes it harder to recognize for website scraping if your email is left online somewhere.
  - ValentineC 8y ago
    I feel like this particular issue happens most often when one uses a catchall, as spammers like to try common usernames and this setup will allow all of them to be received. In those cases, I found that it helps to use an obscure subdomain that doesn't have a website attached to it (e.g. mailus.example.com).
- jdietrich 8y ago
  A lesser-known TLD will massively increase the likelihood of your outbound emails being filtered as spam.
shirro 8y ago
I have spend a handful of days over a decade and a half researching or experimenting with my family mail server config. Given that experience can be useful professionally, even if only to understand the services you are purchasing it seems like time well spent for an individual/family to me. It depends what your focus is within the industry and how much you like to be hands on. If you are an auto mechanic you might service your own vehicle. If you sell vehicles or drive them professionally then perhaps not. It isn't like any single approach is right or any particular role is preferred.
- lowry 8y ago
  I am an enterprise programmer by day and I've been running mail servers for 20 years both for hobbies and for private use. I rarely spend more than an evening per year, mostly to keep up with new developments in that space. A few years ago I deployed DMARC. Last year I registered in postmaster tools at Google, Yahooo, Yandex and a few others. This is it.
cm2187 8y ago
I disagree with the full time job. When you run it for yourself and your family it is not that much work (if you have to support lots of people, different story). Particularly if you don't have to deal with the hardware (VM). To me the biggest objection is cost, and technical complexity to set up. For managing spam, I found that the best solution when you own your own domain is to give a different alias to anyone who wants your email and keep a record of the mapping (I had to create a little website that does that for me). If you start receiving spam, then just delete that alias (this is why the "+" alias feature in gmail not really useful, plus it leaks the underlying email). I use Smartermail, which runs on windows, and allows you to reply to an email from the alias it was sent to. This is a low maintenance, zero spam solution. For patching, windows patches itself. You need to update smatermail manually though, so it takes about 10 minutes every month or so. I automated the renewal of certificates with letsencrypt. The only thing that has been a source of worry and requires to keep an eye on is failed login attempts (I scripted it but it is worth monitoring). Once I had created a test email account with a weak password, and some spambot got access to it by bruteforcing passwords in smtp. Then it started sending tens of thousands of spam emails from that account, which got me on gmail's blacklist for a month, even if the whole event lasted less than one hour (smatermail notified me of the suspected spam activity).
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  How do you avoid downtime? Gmail is not going to go down out of the blue, but my own server could easily do that when my internet randomly goes out.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    If you want to send emails, don't run it from home. Most mail server will increase the spam level of an email coming from a dynamic ip or where the reverse dns doesn't match the name of the server. If you just want to receive emails, then it depends how long is your downtime. Smtp requires that the sending server makes several attempts if the first failed, so if you are only off for a few minutes to a few hours, you will get your emails, just delayed. If full day downtime then this is not a viable solution. If you need to send emails, then you kind of have to host your server in a datacentre. A cheap VM should probably be a good solution for a first attempt. You will still get downtime occasionally (update OS, update mail software, problem with your hosting provider). A cheap solution is to set up a failover server at home since it is only to receive emails while the primary server is down, with a lax retry policy (up to a few days).
ulrikrasmussen 8y ago
What? I have been managing my own mail server and domain for 10+ years now, and apart from a few days spent reading up on DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc., it has been mostly set and forget.
- jocoda 8y ago
  My experience has been likewise. Only problem I had, and still have in the short term, is that one server's IP C block has been flagged by one spam service. And even though my server's IP gets a clean bill of health from all other SPAM services, outlook.com refuses to accept mail from that server. I had them white list the IP but it reverted shortly after that. The ISP (strato) refuses to do anything about it, and not sure if there is anything they can do, so all I can do is vote with my feet. Otherwise, running a personal mail server is hardly any effort at all. Use Webmin for admin.
  - algesten 8y ago
    it's only outlook.com? you can't fix it? i mean that's a rather large group of people you can't communicate with right there. and it's the only one you know about. i say this is the exact reason running your own mail server in 2018 is problematic. you just chose to not consider it a problem.
    - tolien 8y ago
      > i say this is the exact reason running your own mail server in 2018 is problematic. It's a reason why allowing these fairly core services to be provided by a shrinking group of organisations is equally problematic. Maybe one day Google will decide that they get too much spam from outlook.com (or vice versa) and cut them off too. What are you going to do about it, set up your own mail server? Vote with your feet to another provider? Start a company doing the same? Good luck with that.
    - jocoda 8y ago
      It's not the only mail server I have running but it is the only one that has this problem. So bye bye strato. >.. it's the only one you know about. In the case of outlook.com, there's a delivery failure message. My yardstick is gmail.com. If the mail is getting to gmail accounts then I'm confident that it's as good as it is going to get.
8_hours_ago 8y ago
I highly recommend FastMail for a paid email provider. Their support staff is quick to respond, and it’s nice to be a customer instead of a product (i.e. pay for the service instead of getting it for free with ads)
- imron 8y ago
  I second this. I ran my own mail server for a couple of years (a good educational experience), but after a while I figured it was far less hassle to pay someone else to deal with it. FastMail have been an excellent email provider, and support has always been responsive and useful.
  - ekovarski 8y ago
    FastMail is amazing; there were a few hiccups early on with the native iOS productivity apps but its been smooth sailing for years now. If you can, definitely try to run your own mail server for the experience but start of gradually, e.g. relay outbound email through an smtp service, and slowly add the different layers such as spam analysis, filtering, etc. There are /so/ many layers to email these days that if you try to do it all at once you'll spend way too much time on just keeping the wheels from turning.
Qwertie 8y ago
I have run email servers for myself and businesses. Every single headache I have had was related to some user having a shit password or malware on there PC and then spammers send spam from their address. My personal email server has been hassle free. I use https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ which you just run the setup script and tell it your domain name and everything is set up correctly. It sends me an email every now and then saying it needs updating and thats all.
- mcny 8y ago
  How do I set up mail in a box on a sub domain? Example.com is on outlook which I cannot disrupt but I’d like to set up and programmatically access all the emails coming to anything at dev.example.com Preferably just query what emails do I have coming in for local name at dev dot example dot com Deliverability is not a problem because I don’t intend to send any mail. Just need a sinkhole I can query. How difficult is this?
  - Qwertie 8y ago
    I haven't done it but I see no reason why it would be hard. You just tell it the domain to use which should be able to include the subdomain. One thing is that usually you point the domain's nameserver at the mailinabox server and it sets up all the right records for you. If you can do that on a subdomain then it's super easy. If not you just have to manually set all the records. Mailinabox shows you everything to set if you do it this way though.
derefr 8y ago
> filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts Is there not just an open-source pre-trained spam-filtering model (using whatever is the state of the art for these—guessing classical Bayesian filtering on word-tokens is no longer at all what Gmail is doing)? It’d be a nice complement to the open RBLs, no?
- ivan_ah 8y ago
  There are, but they are not state of the art. There is also the benefit of the spam filter service being "live updated," e.g. if a new type of spam message comes up it will get flagged since lots of users.
reustle 8y ago
Does a service (api?) exist where I can run my own email server but all email is forwarded to this service and it returns a Boolean for "is spam", then my local email server files it into a spam folder automatically. This way I always keep full control and can exclude forwarding emails from my contacts list.
- pas 8y ago
  rspamd is as good as it gets, you can run it locally, you need to train the filters "of course", but you can do it incrementally - as mail pours in you put spam into the spam folder [0], and rspamd (via rmilter via postfix) puts a X-Spam-Flag header into the mail, so sieve (part of dovecot) sorts if out [1]. of course, there are a bunch of cloud/hosted/SaaS versions, usually they front-proxy your email servers via MX records [2] [0]: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#spam-learning-with-rspamd https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#spam... [1]: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#global-sieve-filter-to-move-marked-spam-mails https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#glob... [2] https://www.everycloudtech.com/ https://www.everycloudtech.com/
syshum 8y ago
>>>In a past life I ran email services for a small business, and then a medium business it was a full time job, just keeping us out of the spam blacklists Running it onPrem using the ISP the is connected to office I bet... That is a common problem with small businesses as they do not properly setup the ISP service and many SPAM lists automatically add the dynamically assigned IP ranges of most ISP has these are not setup to allow hosted services across them so by default no one expect to see a email server on that type of connection. Thus it is blocked. Outside of that companies like MailRoute can help with routing to email traffic, and provide some level of HA for your email services. >> ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) SPF, DKIM, DMARC are not really new, nor have they changed much in years. Thought most people still fail at getting it right. I am dealing with an issue with my bank right now where one Division is not talking to another division but they all use the same main domain for sending email so of course SPF record does not have ALL of the mail servers listed ... sigh... >>filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts. There are many 3rd parties out there providing these types of services, I would use them. MX Gaurd Dog is probably one of more reasonably priced services but there are all kinds of other from Mimecast to Proofpoint, and many many others >>I tell them outsource email to a major provider and use your limited time/effort elsewhere. Better rate of return by far. I am not opposed to that persay. I also advice my clients if they are going to do that, at minimum they need a email archiving solution that is NOT with that same provider so they do not have all of their critical communications locked up in a single point of failure. For better or worse many companies live and die by email and if Email data is lost that can be DEVASTATING to a company. Having it all locked into a service you do not control is a high risk business ending decision IMO
ms512 8y ago
While I agree with setting up an email server not being a trivial endeavor, I managed to learn a lot and complete setup within a few hours by following one of the many available tutorials ([1], [2]) and the ongoing maintenance has been minimal. I took the plunge about 4 years ago after being uncomfortable with the possibility of losing my main Gmail account. Ultimately, I decided that if I didn't own my email address, I was at the mercy of Gmail if anything went wrong. I came to the conclusion that losing my main email account would be more painful and time consuming than running my own server. At the time, I considered an alternative of owning my own domain and doing mail forwarding to Gmail or using a smaller email hosting provider, but decided there was value in learning more about how email worked. [1] http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ [2] https://www.linode.com/docs/email/running-a-mail-server/ https://www.linode.com/docs/email/running-a-mail-server/
- setquk 8y ago
  It’s ok running your mail server until yahoo black list you and there is no recourse for 6 months other than all email to yahoo will be deferred permanently. Unfortunately I know lots of people on yahoo (still) and no amount of brow beating appears to be changing that. Paying for FastMail did the job for me in the end. It’s the least shit solution I’ve encountered so far. Note I didn’t use the word best.

yani 8y ago

I keep hearing the same over and over from sysadmins. Is this too difficult to automate?

jwr 8y ago
Ask an architect if it's difficult to build a house, and he'll scare you with tales of complexity. But that doesn't mean you can't build a shed yourself. It can't be completely automated, but it isn't as difficult or time-consuming as people paint it to be (especially sysadmins!). I've been doing it for nearly 18 years now, maintenance takes perhaps 30 minutes every 2 months or so. There is more to do every 8 years or so, as Linux distributions go out of date, and your providers sometimes go out of business. I have my suspicions as to all the FUD regarding running your own E-mail server. Secure personal E-mail distributed on many independent servers with automatic in-transit encryption is not in everyone's interest.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago

> It is absolutely not set and forget, you'll need to baby it daily indefinitely. That sounds like you were doing something very fundamentally very wrong. I definitely don't need to touch my mail server daily, nor any of the mail servers I manage for others. It's just doing its job, security updates get installed automatically, and every few years I need to do a debian upgrade, and possibly deploy some new security/anti-spam features. In between those upgrades, it's running unattended for many months with absolutely no problems. On average, I touch my mail server maybe once a year.

sneak 8y ago
I can second this, but it’s a full 8 hour day once per year when some spamassassin or amavis config breaks in an update... not to mention the normal sysadmin stuff of backups, verifying backups, logging, monitoring, et c. It’s a big project to run a mailserver. (Source: been doing so for 21 years.)
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  Well, you also need backups with a "cloud" solution, so that's no difference. As for monitoring: If you only run it for yourself or a small org, really, you can do just fine without monitoring. If the mail access side breaks, you'll notice, if the inbound side breaks, you'll probably also notice soon enough. But then, setting up a minimal monit that tells you when storage runs low or the MX is down really isn't that difficult either. So, no, it's not a big project. It's as much of a big project as owning a car, probably less so, if you consider the amount of effort/time required (assuming you have an IT background, obviously).
godzillabrennus 8y ago
I also managed email for a living and helped transition many enterprises to cloud email solutions. It’s quite likely that other, unauthorized folks, are touching your mail system more frequently than you with such a lax attitude. Definitely outsource your email unless you want the experience. If you want security it seems reasonable to use ProtonMail.com instead of larger cloud providers like Google or Microsoft.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  "It’s quite likely that other, unauthorized folks, are touching your mail system more frequently than you with such a lax attitude." This is complete nonsense. I cannot imagine that there is anything particularly magical that requires something other than regular security updates on any server. Manual intervention is borne of changing requirements or broken things. Why should an email server for a handful of users require a lot of manual intervention?
- 8y ago

anonytrary 8y ago

> keeping us out of the spam blacklists, keeping things patched up, ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) and filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts It is so easy to forget how much noise and junk gets passed around via email when I've had Google doing it for me for all these years...

zatkin 8y ago

Having a lesser known TLD (.gd) helps in my case. I get spam email once in a blue moon.

cm2187 8y ago
I believe most of the spam comes from your email address being leaked by a company or website. Not sure how what your TLD is has anything to do with it.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  I would guess it makes it harder to recognize for website scraping if your email is left online somewhere.
- ValentineC 8y ago
  I feel like this particular issue happens most often when one uses a catchall, as spammers like to try common usernames and this setup will allow all of them to be received. In those cases, I found that it helps to use an obscure subdomain that doesn't have a website attached to it (e.g. mailus.example.com).
jdietrich 8y ago
A lesser-known TLD will massively increase the likelihood of your outbound emails being filtered as spam.

shirro 8y ago

I have spend a handful of days over a decade and a half researching or experimenting with my family mail server config. Given that experience can be useful professionally, even if only to understand the services you are purchasing it seems like time well spent for an individual/family to me. It depends what your focus is within the industry and how much you like to be hands on. If you are an auto mechanic you might service your own vehicle. If you sell vehicles or drive them professionally then perhaps not. It isn't like any single approach is right or any particular role is preferred.

lowry 8y ago
I am an enterprise programmer by day and I've been running mail servers for 20 years both for hobbies and for private use. I rarely spend more than an evening per year, mostly to keep up with new developments in that space. A few years ago I deployed DMARC. Last year I registered in postmaster tools at Google, Yahooo, Yandex and a few others. This is it.

cm2187 8y ago

I disagree with the full time job. When you run it for yourself and your family it is not that much work (if you have to support lots of people, different story). Particularly if you don't have to deal with the hardware (VM). To me the biggest objection is cost, and technical complexity to set up. For managing spam, I found that the best solution when you own your own domain is to give a different alias to anyone who wants your email and keep a record of the mapping (I had to create a little website that does that for me). If you start receiving spam, then just delete that alias (this is why the "+" alias feature in gmail not really useful, plus it leaks the underlying email). I use Smartermail, which runs on windows, and allows you to reply to an email from the alias it was sent to. This is a low maintenance, zero spam solution. For patching, windows patches itself. You need to update smatermail manually though, so it takes about 10 minutes every month or so. I automated the renewal of certificates with letsencrypt. The only thing that has been a source of worry and requires to keep an eye on is failed login attempts (I scripted it but it is worth monitoring). Once I had created a test email account with a weak password, and some spambot got access to it by bruteforcing passwords in smtp. Then it started sending tens of thousands of spam emails from that account, which got me on gmail's blacklist for a month, even if the whole event lasted less than one hour (smatermail notified me of the suspected spam activity).

mehrdadn 8y ago
How do you avoid downtime? Gmail is not going to go down out of the blue, but my own server could easily do that when my internet randomly goes out.
- cm2187 8y ago
  If you want to send emails, don't run it from home. Most mail server will increase the spam level of an email coming from a dynamic ip or where the reverse dns doesn't match the name of the server. If you just want to receive emails, then it depends how long is your downtime. Smtp requires that the sending server makes several attempts if the first failed, so if you are only off for a few minutes to a few hours, you will get your emails, just delayed. If full day downtime then this is not a viable solution. If you need to send emails, then you kind of have to host your server in a datacentre. A cheap VM should probably be a good solution for a first attempt. You will still get downtime occasionally (update OS, update mail software, problem with your hosting provider). A cheap solution is to set up a failover server at home since it is only to receive emails while the primary server is down, with a lax retry policy (up to a few days).

ulrikrasmussen 8y ago

What? I have been managing my own mail server and domain for 10+ years now, and apart from a few days spent reading up on DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc., it has been mostly set and forget.

jocoda 8y ago
My experience has been likewise. Only problem I had, and still have in the short term, is that one server's IP C block has been flagged by one spam service. And even though my server's IP gets a clean bill of health from all other SPAM services, outlook.com refuses to accept mail from that server. I had them white list the IP but it reverted shortly after that. The ISP (strato) refuses to do anything about it, and not sure if there is anything they can do, so all I can do is vote with my feet. Otherwise, running a personal mail server is hardly any effort at all. Use Webmin for admin.
- algesten 8y ago
  it's only outlook.com? you can't fix it? i mean that's a rather large group of people you can't communicate with right there. and it's the only one you know about. i say this is the exact reason running your own mail server in 2018 is problematic. you just chose to not consider it a problem.
  - tolien 8y ago
    > i say this is the exact reason running your own mail server in 2018 is problematic. It's a reason why allowing these fairly core services to be provided by a shrinking group of organisations is equally problematic. Maybe one day Google will decide that they get too much spam from outlook.com (or vice versa) and cut them off too. What are you going to do about it, set up your own mail server? Vote with your feet to another provider? Start a company doing the same? Good luck with that.
  - jocoda 8y ago
    It's not the only mail server I have running but it is the only one that has this problem. So bye bye strato. >.. it's the only one you know about. In the case of outlook.com, there's a delivery failure message. My yardstick is gmail.com. If the mail is getting to gmail accounts then I'm confident that it's as good as it is going to get.

8_hours_ago 8y ago

I highly recommend FastMail for a paid email provider. Their support staff is quick to respond, and it’s nice to be a customer instead of a product (i.e. pay for the service instead of getting it for free with ads)

imron 8y ago
I second this. I ran my own mail server for a couple of years (a good educational experience), but after a while I figured it was far less hassle to pay someone else to deal with it. FastMail have been an excellent email provider, and support has always been responsive and useful.
- ekovarski 8y ago
  FastMail is amazing; there were a few hiccups early on with the native iOS productivity apps but its been smooth sailing for years now. If you can, definitely try to run your own mail server for the experience but start of gradually, e.g. relay outbound email through an smtp service, and slowly add the different layers such as spam analysis, filtering, etc. There are /so/ many layers to email these days that if you try to do it all at once you'll spend way too much time on just keeping the wheels from turning.

Qwertie 8y ago

I have run email servers for myself and businesses. Every single headache I have had was related to some user having a shit password or malware on there PC and then spammers send spam from their address. My personal email server has been hassle free. I use https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ which you just run the setup script and tell it your domain name and everything is set up correctly. It sends me an email every now and then saying it needs updating and thats all.

mcny 8y ago
How do I set up mail in a box on a sub domain? Example.com is on outlook which I cannot disrupt but I’d like to set up and programmatically access all the emails coming to anything at dev.example.com Preferably just query what emails do I have coming in for local name at dev dot example dot com Deliverability is not a problem because I don’t intend to send any mail. Just need a sinkhole I can query. How difficult is this?
- Qwertie 8y ago
  I haven't done it but I see no reason why it would be hard. You just tell it the domain to use which should be able to include the subdomain. One thing is that usually you point the domain's nameserver at the mailinabox server and it sets up all the right records for you. If you can do that on a subdomain then it's super easy. If not you just have to manually set all the records. Mailinabox shows you everything to set if you do it this way though.

derefr 8y ago

> filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts Is there not just an open-source pre-trained spam-filtering model (using whatever is the state of the art for these—guessing classical Bayesian filtering on word-tokens is no longer at all what Gmail is doing)? It’d be a nice complement to the open RBLs, no?

ivan_ah 8y ago
There are, but they are not state of the art. There is also the benefit of the spam filter service being "live updated," e.g. if a new type of spam message comes up it will get flagged since lots of users.

reustle 8y ago

Does a service (api?) exist where I can run my own email server but all email is forwarded to this service and it returns a Boolean for "is spam", then my local email server files it into a spam folder automatically. This way I always keep full control and can exclude forwarding emails from my contacts list.

pas 8y ago
rspamd is as good as it gets, you can run it locally, you need to train the filters "of course", but you can do it incrementally - as mail pours in you put spam into the spam folder [0], and rspamd (via rmilter via postfix) puts a X-Spam-Flag header into the mail, so sieve (part of dovecot) sorts if out [1]. of course, there are a bunch of cloud/hosted/SaaS versions, usually they front-proxy your email servers via MX records [2] [0]: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#spam-learning-with-rspamd https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#spam... [1]: https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#global-sieve-filter-to-move-marked-spam-mails https://thomas-leister.de/en/mailserver-debian-stretch/#glob... [2] https://www.everycloudtech.com/ https://www.everycloudtech.com/

syshum 8y ago

>>>In a past life I ran email services for a small business, and then a medium business it was a full time job, just keeping us out of the spam blacklists Running it onPrem using the ISP the is connected to office I bet... That is a common problem with small businesses as they do not properly setup the ISP service and many SPAM lists automatically add the dynamically assigned IP ranges of most ISP has these are not setup to allow hosted services across them so by default no one expect to see a email server on that type of connection. Thus it is blocked. Outside of that companies like MailRoute can help with routing to email traffic, and provide some level of HA for your email services. >> ecosystem changes (e.g. new DNS records every few years, new security requirements, etc) SPF, DKIM, DMARC are not really new, nor have they changed much in years. Thought most people still fail at getting it right. I am dealing with an issue with my bank right now where one Division is not talking to another division but they all use the same main domain for sending email so of course SPF record does not have ALL of the mail servers listed ... sigh... >>filtering incoming spam/malware/philishing attempts. There are many 3rd parties out there providing these types of services, I would use them. MX Gaurd Dog is probably one of more reasonably priced services but there are all kinds of other from Mimecast to Proofpoint, and many many others >>I tell them outsource email to a major provider and use your limited time/effort elsewhere. Better rate of return by far. I am not opposed to that persay. I also advice my clients if they are going to do that, at minimum they need a email archiving solution that is NOT with that same provider so they do not have all of their critical communications locked up in a single point of failure. For better or worse many companies live and die by email and if Email data is lost that can be DEVASTATING to a company. Having it all locked into a service you do not control is a high risk business ending decision IMO

ms512 8y ago

While I agree with setting up an email server not being a trivial endeavor, I managed to learn a lot and complete setup within a few hours by following one of the many available tutorials ([1], [2]) and the ongoing maintenance has been minimal. I took the plunge about 4 years ago after being uncomfortable with the possibility of losing my main Gmail account. Ultimately, I decided that if I didn't own my email address, I was at the mercy of Gmail if anything went wrong. I came to the conclusion that losing my main email account would be more painful and time consuming than running my own server. At the time, I considered an alternative of owning my own domain and doing mail forwarding to Gmail or using a smaller email hosting provider, but decided there was value in learning more about how email worked. [1] http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/ [2] https://www.linode.com/docs/email/running-a-mail-server/ https://www.linode.com/docs/email/running-a-mail-server/

setquk 8y ago
It’s ok running your mail server until yahoo black list you and there is no recourse for 6 months other than all email to yahoo will be deferred permanently. Unfortunately I know lots of people on yahoo (still) and no amount of brow beating appears to be changing that. Paying for FastMail did the job for me in the end. It’s the least shit solution I’ve encountered so far. Note I didn’t use the word best.