Been running my email infrastructure for IIRC about 8-9 years (with postfix). Spam isn't much of a thing, which perpetually surprised me but there it is. Some

Been running my email infrastructure for IIRC about 8-9 years (with postfix). Spam isn't much of a thing, which perpetually surprised me but there it is. Some background: before I ran my own email server I relied on my ISP for receiving email for my domains and I was getting hundreds (even thousands) of spam messages a day. I used spamprobe to classify the spam away, very effectively. But that ISP must've had a very lenient smtp configuration. With my own email server I enforce everything postfix supports enforcing at the time of the connection itself. Watching the postfix logs, I get multiple spam attempts per second but all of them are rejected before the connection attempt is accepted by postfix. Actual spam that gets through that is minimal. About zero to five per week for me. I'm still using spamprobe to classify them just out of inertia, but the volume of spam is so low it isn't necessary. As to outgoing email getting junked, it's harder to have exact statistics on this but it has never been an issue for me in the sense of not getting a response from someone, so they must've received it. You do need to configure SPF, DKIM, etc but aside from that, it's not a big deal. There are sites which help verify your configuration, use them. Every time an smtp thread pops up on yc the difficulty of running your own email infrastructure is overstated. Of course I wouldn't recommend it to completely non-technical people, but if you have any interest in internet standards, just do it. Own your infrastructure, help us all decentralize email and don't be the next victim of "gmail locked me out of my life and I have no one to call for help".