4 ms·

I've been running email servers since the '90s, and there's surprisingly little work that needs to be done once it's up and running.

eatonphil 5y ago
Sure, you and many people. I'm saying there's an in-between level of enthusiasm where you do want to learn new things and experiment but without getting yourself into any long-term commitments. I'm sure you'd agree that it's also easier to scale your experiments/interest if you only do small experiments rather than go all the way in every dimension.
excitom 5y ago
I ran email servers for my personal domains in the 90s and early 2000s. What eventually caused me to move everything to gmail was the massive pain of dealing with spam and trying to keep up with the latest spam filtering, which is essential.
- georgyo 5y ago
  Rspamd has made that trivial for a number of years. It's an amazing tool.
- megous 5y ago
  You don't need to keep up with anything if you use bogofilter, or similar statistics based methods, to classify it. You can do server side filtering based on other non-content things like DNS lookups, or IP blacklists, but that's just adding needless failure modes on the receive side. I don't do any non-content filtering, to keep things simple for the senders and latency down. Statistical methods are just that effective on a personal mail server level.
- znpy 5y ago
  I've been running my own mailserver for the last ten years and I must say that nowadays I'm not even running an antispam filter anymore because I basically don't get spam. What I do instead (instead of running an antispam server) is checking all stuff that a proper mail admin would do, that is: - greylisting (postgrey) - reject hosts not listed in spf records for the sender (spf-policyd) - verifying dkim signatures, if present (opendkim) Also f#@k spamhaus and those people, they will mark you as a spam host on pure prejudice.
  - jesterson 5y ago
    Wonder how it works for you... I've been running my own mail infrastructure for 10+ years. hosting tens of domains with hundreds of thousands of messages daily. That's said, most of my spam senders match SPF and have proper DKIM records. Only few absolutely outrageous spammers ignore it. Setting DKIM and SPF is not a rocket science and I'd be extremely surprised if spammers wouldn't do that.
    - znpy 5y ago
      Uh ... Your dkim settings are for your recipients to validate your emails. You should ALSO be checking dkim signatures on incoming e-mails (opendkim does that IIRC). Also, I forgot to mention that I REQUIRE tls for incoming smtp connection. That's another thing rising the bar for spammers. If you're using postfix, it's very open by default, in the sense that it doest not come with spf and/or dkim/dmarc tooling and it's not going to, for example, require (or even allow) ssl/tls for incoming smtp connections (and won't use it for outgoing smtp connection). One last thing: a little bit of spam leaks trough... But it's like less than a single spam email per two weeks.
      - jesterson 5y ago
        > I forgot to mention that I REQUIRE tls for incoming smtp connection This would cut quite a number of legitimate emails for me. Surprised it works for you.
        znpy 5y ago
        It probably does, but it's 2022 and we should really stop using plaintext protocols on the public internet, at least for private stuff like emails.
        jesterson 5y ago
        I may agree with you here but reality doesn't always match our expectations.
- jjav 5y ago
  Spam is basically a non-issue these days. Just run your favorite bayesian filter locally and it's taken care of. On my mail server I don't do any silly blocking, simply pass everything through spamprobe and my spam rate is so close to zero that I don't notice. Maybe like once a month.
icedchai 5y ago
Same here. I started running my own mail servers back in 1994. Through the years, I've run smail, sendmail, qmail. My current stack is postfix, dovecot, rspamd running on FreeBSD.
gnubison 5y ago
This is usually the case for people who’ve been running them since the 90s because of IP address trust and all that, as far as I can tell.
- Avamander 5y ago
  No, you can deliver to most from even damn OVH. It just takes patience and the output has to be meticulous.

eatonphil 5y ago

Sure, you and many people. I'm saying there's an in-between level of enthusiasm where you do want to learn new things and experiment but without getting yourself into any long-term commitments. I'm sure you'd agree that it's also easier to scale your experiments/interest if you only do small experiments rather than go all the way in every dimension.

excitom 5y ago

I ran email servers for my personal domains in the 90s and early 2000s. What eventually caused me to move everything to gmail was the massive pain of dealing with spam and trying to keep up with the latest spam filtering, which is essential.

georgyo 5y ago
Rspamd has made that trivial for a number of years. It's an amazing tool.
megous 5y ago
You don't need to keep up with anything if you use bogofilter, or similar statistics based methods, to classify it. You can do server side filtering based on other non-content things like DNS lookups, or IP blacklists, but that's just adding needless failure modes on the receive side. I don't do any non-content filtering, to keep things simple for the senders and latency down. Statistical methods are just that effective on a personal mail server level.
znpy 5y ago
I've been running my own mailserver for the last ten years and I must say that nowadays I'm not even running an antispam filter anymore because I basically don't get spam. What I do instead (instead of running an antispam server) is checking all stuff that a proper mail admin would do, that is: - greylisting (postgrey) - reject hosts not listed in spf records for the sender (spf-policyd) - verifying dkim signatures, if present (opendkim) Also f#@k spamhaus and those people, they will mark you as a spam host on pure prejudice.
- jesterson 5y ago
  Wonder how it works for you... I've been running my own mail infrastructure for 10+ years. hosting tens of domains with hundreds of thousands of messages daily. That's said, most of my spam senders match SPF and have proper DKIM records. Only few absolutely outrageous spammers ignore it. Setting DKIM and SPF is not a rocket science and I'd be extremely surprised if spammers wouldn't do that.
  - znpy 5y ago
    Uh ... Your dkim settings are for your recipients to validate your emails. You should ALSO be checking dkim signatures on incoming e-mails (opendkim does that IIRC). Also, I forgot to mention that I REQUIRE tls for incoming smtp connection. That's another thing rising the bar for spammers. If you're using postfix, it's very open by default, in the sense that it doest not come with spf and/or dkim/dmarc tooling and it's not going to, for example, require (or even allow) ssl/tls for incoming smtp connections (and won't use it for outgoing smtp connection). One last thing: a little bit of spam leaks trough... But it's like less than a single spam email per two weeks.
    - jesterson 5y ago
      > I forgot to mention that I REQUIRE tls for incoming smtp connection This would cut quite a number of legitimate emails for me. Surprised it works for you.
      - znpy 5y ago
        It probably does, but it's 2022 and we should really stop using plaintext protocols on the public internet, at least for private stuff like emails.
        jesterson 5y ago
        I may agree with you here but reality doesn't always match our expectations.
jjav 5y ago
Spam is basically a non-issue these days. Just run your favorite bayesian filter locally and it's taken care of. On my mail server I don't do any silly blocking, simply pass everything through spamprobe and my spam rate is so close to zero that I don't notice. Maybe like once a month.

icedchai 5y ago

Same here. I started running my own mail servers back in 1994. Through the years, I've run smail, sendmail, qmail. My current stack is postfix, dovecot, rspamd running on FreeBSD.

gnubison 5y ago

This is usually the case for people who’ve been running them since the 90s because of IP address trust and all that, as far as I can tell.

Avamander 5y ago
No, you can deliver to most from even damn OVH. It just takes patience and the output has to be meticulous.