5 ms·

I don't use any kind of block list on my mail server, as I find the concept to be fundamentally flawed. I accept all incoming email as long as basic sanity on t

by jjav 4y ago

I don't use any kind of block list on my mail server, as I find the concept to be fundamentally flawed. I accept all incoming email as long as basic sanity on the connection is met and then apply bayesian filtering after the email has been accepted. I get just about no spam at all (<10 per month, maybe).

whiplash451 4y ago
One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail)
- jjav 4y ago
  > One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail) That's funny since on gmail I get tons more spam than on any of my self-hosted domain addresses. What's worse, I see emails in gmail misfiled as spam when they are not, which is far worse. I don't ever see that happen in my self-hosted system.
- olau 4y ago
  I get > 1 spam per day on gmail.com. But I don't find that burdensome at all, in fact I'd prefer that gmail let more stuff through to my spam folder instead of swallowing things that it misclassifies, because I have seen several instances of lost legitimate email, something I still don't understand how is deemed acceptable to the people who wrote it. But I need to vote with my feet instead of complaining.
zimpenfish 4y ago
I use block lists, fail2ban, gray listing, most of rspamd's widgets, and Bayesian filtering. Still getting 10s of spams a day just to my accounts.
- dvdkon 4y ago
  Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? I self-host and get fewer than 10 true spam emails per year (not counting marketing newsletters).
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? That would be an interesting research project. The domains getting most spams on my servers are the ones that are old (20+ years) which I guess makes sense. Checking the rspamd logs for the last month gives just shy of 8500 emails with what I'd consider "definitely a spam" score. There's probably another 1000-1500 sneaking under that.
    - jjav 4y ago
      > > Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? > That would be an interesting research project. Indeed. When you say get spam, do you mean pre or post-filtering? Over the last 30 days (I don't keep them longer than that) I've received 43 spam emails which were sent to the spam folder (so I wouldn't ever see these, other than because I went and looked now for the sake of this discussion). In the same time period there was only 1 spam email which was missed by spamprobe and made it into my inbox spool. There's a fair amount of would-be spam that gets blocked during the SMTP transaction due to things like bogus host in HELO, etc. I don't keep any stats on those, I did at one time but it was too much noise. My email isn't secret, it should be on every spammer list I'd guess. It has been the same since the mid 90s and is all over usenet, email list archives, websites, etc and I've never made any effort to mask it.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        > Indeed. When you say get spam, do you mean pre or post-filtering? All my numbers are post-rspamd. There's still sieve after that which does the "is it scored more than X?" to redirect into spam/not-spam. > There's a fair amount of would-be spam that gets blocked during the SMTP transaction Yeah, the blocklists and protocol strictness rules definitely cut down a lot before it even gets to rspamd.
    - t0k0l0sh 4y ago
      You mentioned receiving 10s of spam per day - are they being classified correctly and put in your spam folder or are you seeing them in your inboxes? My mx hosted with hetzner also runs rspamd. Of the 32k mails received in the last month, 40% were rejected (postfix DISCARD, so the sender sees the mail as accepted but its sent to /dev/null - this only happens to mails scored very highly as spam, or sent to a spam trap address), 10% were greylisted and 1% were delivered to the spam folder. So I'm also receiving 10s of spam per day, but they're all delivered to my spam folder with rare errors. With the exception of an issue delivering to AT&T recently, I haven't had any outbound deliverability problems in a few years, but then again I don't send very much mail at all - perhaps I'd have more trouble if I did but most of my mail is incoming.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good unless you publish your address globally?
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good Not quite sure I follow? Unless you mean "only allow emails to specific email addresses you've noted down", in which case, yeah, that works but also means a lot of admin when you want to use a new one (plus there's 10+ other people who use my servers for email, not just me.) > unless you publish your address globally? At least one of my email addresses has been published globally since ~1995. Others since ~2000.
    - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
      By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        > By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed. How would I automate "[someone with an account] just entered abc-xyz@domain into a web form to subscribe to something, add that to the valid alias file"?
        GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        As I understand, spam filters like postscreen are designed as reverse proxies or relay servers. IIRC spamgourmet supports your scenario.
        zimpenfish 4y ago
        > IIRC spamgourmet supports your scenario. Not really - that's a limited use alias. Doesn't really work for when you want to keep getting email from places. Also if I'm reading that correctly, spammers can just send mail to <randomword>.20.<knownaccount>@spamgourmet.com and you can't protect against those 20 spams.
Avamander 4y ago
You are not a valuable target to spammers. At some point even storing the spam letters makes no financial sense.

by jjav 4y ago

whiplash451 4y ago

One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail)

jjav 4y ago
> One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail) That's funny since on gmail I get tons more spam than on any of my self-hosted domain addresses. What's worse, I see emails in gmail misfiled as spam when they are not, which is far worse. I don't ever see that happen in my self-hosted system.
olau 4y ago
I get > 1 spam per day on gmail.com. But I don't find that burdensome at all, in fact I'd prefer that gmail let more stuff through to my spam folder instead of swallowing things that it misclassifies, because I have seen several instances of lost legitimate email, something I still don't understand how is deemed acceptable to the people who wrote it. But I need to vote with my feet instead of complaining.

zimpenfish 4y ago

I use block lists, fail2ban, gray listing, most of rspamd's widgets, and Bayesian filtering. Still getting 10s of spams a day just to my accounts.

dvdkon 4y ago
Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? I self-host and get fewer than 10 true spam emails per year (not counting marketing newsletters).
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? That would be an interesting research project. The domains getting most spams on my servers are the ones that are old (20+ years) which I guess makes sense. Checking the rspamd logs for the last month gives just shy of 8500 emails with what I'd consider "definitely a spam" score. There's probably another 1000-1500 sneaking under that.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > > Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? > That would be an interesting research project. Indeed. When you say get spam, do you mean pre or post-filtering? Over the last 30 days (I don't keep them longer than that) I've received 43 spam emails which were sent to the spam folder (so I wouldn't ever see these, other than because I went and looked now for the sake of this discussion). In the same time period there was only 1 spam email which was missed by spamprobe and made it into my inbox spool. There's a fair amount of would-be spam that gets blocked during the SMTP transaction due to things like bogus host in HELO, etc. I don't keep any stats on those, I did at one time but it was too much noise. My email isn't secret, it should be on every spammer list I'd guess. It has been the same since the mid 90s and is all over usenet, email list archives, websites, etc and I've never made any effort to mask it.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > Indeed. When you say get spam, do you mean pre or post-filtering? All my numbers are post-rspamd. There's still sieve after that which does the "is it scored more than X?" to redirect into spam/not-spam. > There's a fair amount of would-be spam that gets blocked during the SMTP transaction Yeah, the blocklists and protocol strictness rules definitely cut down a lot before it even gets to rspamd.
  - t0k0l0sh 4y ago
    You mentioned receiving 10s of spam per day - are they being classified correctly and put in your spam folder or are you seeing them in your inboxes? My mx hosted with hetzner also runs rspamd. Of the 32k mails received in the last month, 40% were rejected (postfix DISCARD, so the sender sees the mail as accepted but its sent to /dev/null - this only happens to mails scored very highly as spam, or sent to a spam trap address), 10% were greylisted and 1% were delivered to the spam folder. So I'm also receiving 10s of spam per day, but they're all delivered to my spam folder with rare errors. With the exception of an issue delivering to AT&T recently, I haven't had any outbound deliverability problems in a few years, but then again I don't send very much mail at all - perhaps I'd have more trouble if I did but most of my mail is incoming.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good unless you publish your address globally?
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good Not quite sure I follow? Unless you mean "only allow emails to specific email addresses you've noted down", in which case, yeah, that works but also means a lot of admin when you want to use a new one (plus there's 10+ other people who use my servers for email, not just me.) > unless you publish your address globally? At least one of my email addresses has been published globally since ~1995. Others since ~2000.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed. How would I automate "[someone with an account] just entered abc-xyz@domain into a web form to subscribe to something, add that to the valid alias file"?
      - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        As I understand, spam filters like postscreen are designed as reverse proxies or relay servers. IIRC spamgourmet supports your scenario.
        zimpenfish 4y ago
        > IIRC spamgourmet supports your scenario. Not really - that's a limited use alias. Doesn't really work for when you want to keep getting email from places. Also if I'm reading that correctly, spammers can just send mail to <randomword>.20.<knownaccount>@spamgourmet.com and you can't protect against those 20 spams.

Avamander 4y ago

You are not a valuable target to spammers. At some point even storing the spam letters makes no financial sense.