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Has it gotten that bad? I remember back in the mid-90s, when I was still young and crazy enough to fiddle with sendmail.cf on my first few Linux boxen, setting

by mhd 15y ago

Has it gotten that bad? I remember back in the mid-90s, when I was still young and crazy enough to fiddle with sendmail.cf on my first few Linux boxen, setting up and running your own mail server wasn't that difficult (and again, I'm talking about sendmail here). Has the whole spamocalypse turned this into an nightmare of that magnitude? There goes my plan for moving my personal accounts away from GMail before March 1st...

Silhouette 15y ago
Can't speak for anyone else, but personally I'm getting fed up of legitimate personal e-mails going missing even when sent to long-time friends I've swapped mails with on numerous occasions, only to find they're in the spam tray. These are plain text messages, all sent from the same very small pool of mail servers, with correct headers, consistent From: address that really is me at a personal domain I've held for years, etc. I should not have to jump through non-standardised and somewhat broken hoops like SPF and DKIM just to get a goddam e-mail delivered to my friend. When you reach that point, it's not your e-mail client or domain registration that's broken, it's the receiving e-mail system that's so paranoid about spam that it's regularly diagnosing and (silently) rejecting false positives.
abecedarius 15y ago
I run a mail server on my VPS, did nothing special to set it up, and it mostly works. I probably should look into SPF and reverse DNS and all the other TLAs, since at least craigslist.org silently drops all email from me. There have been two or three other cases over the years. But I'm really lazy and just fall back on gmail for those.
gst 15y ago
No - it's not bad at all as long as you have some minimal understanding about what you are doing. Graylisting + Delayed SMTP prompt + Blacklists + Whitelists works pretty well for filtering incoming spam. For outgoing mail you just need to make sure that you're not sending mail from a dialup IP range, or some other IP range included in common blacklists. It also helps to register on one of the more common whitelists that are available for free. And of course you need a valid reverse lookup - many mailservers don't accept mails from hosts without them.

by mhd 15y ago

Silhouette 15y ago

Can't speak for anyone else, but personally I'm getting fed up of legitimate personal e-mails going missing even when sent to long-time friends I've swapped mails with on numerous occasions, only to find they're in the spam tray. These are plain text messages, all sent from the same very small pool of mail servers, with correct headers, consistent From: address that really is me at a personal domain I've held for years, etc. I should not have to jump through non-standardised and somewhat broken hoops like SPF and DKIM just to get a goddam e-mail delivered to my friend. When you reach that point, it's not your e-mail client or domain registration that's broken, it's the receiving e-mail system that's so paranoid about spam that it's regularly diagnosing and (silently) rejecting false positives.

abecedarius 15y ago

I run a mail server on my VPS, did nothing special to set it up, and it mostly works. I probably should look into SPF and reverse DNS and all the other TLAs, since at least craigslist.org silently drops all email from me. There have been two or three other cases over the years. But I'm really lazy and just fall back on gmail for those.

gst 15y ago

No - it's not bad at all as long as you have some minimal understanding about what you are doing. Graylisting + Delayed SMTP prompt + Blacklists + Whitelists works pretty well for filtering incoming spam. For outgoing mail you just need to make sure that you're not sending mail from a dialup IP range, or some other IP range included in common blacklists. It also helps to register on one of the more common whitelists that are available for free. And of course you need a valid reverse lookup - many mailservers don't accept mails from hosts without them.