7 ms·

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmai

by api 15y ago

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month. Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.

davidw 15y ago
The one that got me was spam filtering. Google does a pretty good job at that, and I was really drowning in it. I think they deserve a lot of credit for creating a product that both my mother (definitely not a 'power user') and I (previous email client: Emacs' Gnus) can both be reasonably productive with.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  It's really easy to install SpamAssassin and point your MTA at it. Even the default configuration is highly effective.
  - davidw 15y ago
    I did that, back in the day, but it just wasn't enough.
    - pyre 15y ago
      One could always mooch off of Gmail's spam filtering... Use SpamAssassin in conjunction with a gmail account that is only used as an attempt to attract as much spam as possible. Then just download the spam folder over IMAP and use it to teach SpamAssassin...
      - coopdog 15y ago
        Gmail's spam filters are so good because they have a network effect going though, I doubt one spam folder would achieve much, you need a much bigger sample of all the spam than one account could ever attract
        alanh 15y ago
        Pretty sure you are making some unwarranted assumptions here – other commenters mention that SpamAssassin can download updates to itself regularly, so you aren’t starting from scratch with a completely untrained Bayesian algorithm.
      - antics 15y ago
        Respectfully, no. The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system. One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to combat this problem, the amount of spam that employed this technique dropped from 5% to close to 0%[1] in a matter of days. Spam detection is complicated and hard. [1] Hulten, G., Penta, A., Seshadrinathan, G., and Mishra, M. Trends in spam products and methods.
        pyre 15y ago
        I'm not saying it's perfect. Obviously having a network effect allows you to do things like flag messages that are exact duplicates over multiple sent-from and sent-to addresses. I've seen this happen where 1 or 2 messages hit my inbox, but the next 20 or so are in my spam folder.
        gnosis 15y ago
        "The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system." Finding holes on sites like gmail and hotmail is actually much easier than on private sites, because the spammers no doubt have accounts on gmail and hotmail and can test what gets through and what fails and tweak their algorithms until their spam gets through. Spammers don't have that luxury on private servers, so they have to spam blindly. So in this respect private servers have an advantage over gmail and hotmail. On the other hand (as has been pointed out many times in this thread), gmail and hotmail have the advantage of advanced spam detection algorithms and virtually instantaneous feedback from millions of users.
    - alextingle 15y ago
      I use SpamAssassin server side, and Thunderbird's own filter polishes off the rest. I see perhaps 1 spam mail per week (from the literally tens of thousands that hit my server).
  - acdha 15y ago
    It's still a service which you have to maintain and there's constant config & upgrading required since some spammers are smart enough to test their messages with it first. I've run SA professionally for modest (low hundreds) of users. It works reasonably well but it's a job and I'm not paid to do it personally.
    - nupark2 15y ago
      SpamAssasin will auto-update its rules if properly configured. I have touched my SA install in years.
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      nupark2 is correct. There's less maintenance involved in running SpamAssassin than there is in running Firefox.
Deadsunrise 15y ago
Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc. Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip. I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.
- hammock 15y ago
  Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)
  - alextingle 15y ago
    Aren't you a little bit uncomfortable giving Google all that data? Do you keep a back-up??
    - msh 15y ago
      Mail.app is keeping a local backup (using imap)
    - apetresc 15y ago
      Not even a little bit. Total number of times Google has lost my data: 0 Total number of times I have accidentally lost my own data: Way more than 0 Total number of times Google has in any way caused me harm by having "access" to my e-mails: 0 Total number of times I've been glad Google used intelligence gathered from my e-mails: Many (pre-populating Google+ circles, training a great spam filter, Priority Inbox, great search, decently appropriate and well-targeted ads)
Niten 15y ago
I disagree on most points... 1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public newsgroups and forums. 2. It's a matter of preference. I too use Mail.app primarily, but I like being able to SSH to my server and read my mail in Mutt. As nice as Gmail's UI is in many regards, it's useless for threaded discussions on mailing lists. 3. Err, ever heard of procmail or maildrop, among (many) others? This is one of the major advantages of running your own mail server, actually; Gmail gives you very limited filtering options, especially when it comes to mailing lists. 4. Gmail has great spam filtering, but I find my Postgrey + SpamAssassin setup to work just as well.
- aethr 15y ago
  And in my experience, OP has it right. 1. Setting up the mail server is not the issue. It's the ongoing maintenance to ensure close to 100% uptime so you don't lose any mail. Having worked as a sysadmin maintaining linux boxes for several companies, mail server maintenance accounted for the vast majority of the hours we spent working on servers. This doesn't even account for the hardware upkeep to keep RAID sets in good shape, tape backups, etc. 2. There is simply no open source project that offers a UI anywhere close to as good as gmail. Yes, someone could take on that project, but it will be years before they achieve a similarly polished result. 3. Sure you could roll your own filtering that would be more effective than gmail's, for you. Again, this is further work that you have to do whereas gmail "just works". 4. SpamAssassin is one of the great open source projects in my opinion. Combined with ClamAV you can get a really robust solution that works fairly well. However (afaik) it lacks the learning heuristics that gmail's huge body of data can provide to keep even the newest template spam out of your inbox. This is not to say that I don't agree with some of your points, but in my opinion the OP has a valid perspective, which I suspect many IT people who value their own time will share.
  - Niten 15y ago
    I do value my own time, and I'll say it again – post setup, I really spend no appreciable time keeping my mail server running. My VPS provider handles all hardware issues (with zero downtime in the last two years), backups consist of a nightly cron job and require no manual intervention, and the last time I touched my Postfix configuration was over a year ago. "Rolling my own filtering" consists of placing a single mailbox_command line in the Postfix configuration file, it hardly qualifies as a time sink. Writing mail filters for procmail takes no more time than doing so in Gmail, the difference is that the former lets you write much more expressive and fine-grained rules. And yes, SpamAssassin does have a built-in learning Bayesian classifier. Which I previously used to learn from anything that I manually classified as spam, but these days I don't even get any spam to invoke it on. See sa-learn(1) for details.
finnw 15y ago
I haven't used Mail.app since an incident about 2 years ago where it deleted a bunch of my messages. I was moving them from one folder to another when the connection to the server dropped. I don't know why this should happen with IMAP (it is possible to move messages from one folder to another atomically) but it did.

by api 15y ago

davidw 15y ago

The one that got me was spam filtering. Google does a pretty good job at that, and I was really drowning in it. I think they deserve a lot of credit for creating a product that both my mother (definitely not a 'power user') and I (previous email client: Emacs' Gnus) can both be reasonably productive with.

mike-cardwell 15y ago
It's really easy to install SpamAssassin and point your MTA at it. Even the default configuration is highly effective.
- davidw 15y ago
  I did that, back in the day, but it just wasn't enough.
  - pyre 15y ago
    One could always mooch off of Gmail's spam filtering... Use SpamAssassin in conjunction with a gmail account that is only used as an attempt to attract as much spam as possible. Then just download the spam folder over IMAP and use it to teach SpamAssassin...
    - coopdog 15y ago
      Gmail's spam filters are so good because they have a network effect going though, I doubt one spam folder would achieve much, you need a much bigger sample of all the spam than one account could ever attract
      - alanh 15y ago
        Pretty sure you are making some unwarranted assumptions here – other commenters mention that SpamAssassin can download updates to itself regularly, so you aren’t starting from scratch with a completely untrained Bayesian algorithm.
    - antics 15y ago
      Respectfully, no. The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system. One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to combat this problem, the amount of spam that employed this technique dropped from 5% to close to 0%[1] in a matter of days. Spam detection is complicated and hard. [1] Hulten, G., Penta, A., Seshadrinathan, G., and Mishra, M. Trends in spam products and methods.
      - pyre 15y ago
        I'm not saying it's perfect. Obviously having a network effect allows you to do things like flag messages that are exact duplicates over multiple sent-from and sent-to addresses. I've seen this happen where 1 or 2 messages hit my inbox, but the next 20 or so are in my spam folder.
      - gnosis 15y ago
        "The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system." Finding holes on sites like gmail and hotmail is actually much easier than on private sites, because the spammers no doubt have accounts on gmail and hotmail and can test what gets through and what fails and tweak their algorithms until their spam gets through. Spammers don't have that luxury on private servers, so they have to spam blindly. So in this respect private servers have an advantage over gmail and hotmail. On the other hand (as has been pointed out many times in this thread), gmail and hotmail have the advantage of advanced spam detection algorithms and virtually instantaneous feedback from millions of users.
  - alextingle 15y ago
    I use SpamAssassin server side, and Thunderbird's own filter polishes off the rest. I see perhaps 1 spam mail per week (from the literally tens of thousands that hit my server).
- acdha 15y ago
  It's still a service which you have to maintain and there's constant config & upgrading required since some spammers are smart enough to test their messages with it first. I've run SA professionally for modest (low hundreds) of users. It works reasonably well but it's a job and I'm not paid to do it personally.
  - nupark2 15y ago
    SpamAssasin will auto-update its rules if properly configured. I have touched my SA install in years.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    nupark2 is correct. There's less maintenance involved in running SpamAssassin than there is in running Firefox.

Deadsunrise 15y ago

Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc. Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip. I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.

hammock 15y ago
Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)
- alextingle 15y ago
  Aren't you a little bit uncomfortable giving Google all that data? Do you keep a back-up??
  - msh 15y ago
    Mail.app is keeping a local backup (using imap)
  - apetresc 15y ago
    Not even a little bit. Total number of times Google has lost my data: 0 Total number of times I have accidentally lost my own data: Way more than 0 Total number of times Google has in any way caused me harm by having "access" to my e-mails: 0 Total number of times I've been glad Google used intelligence gathered from my e-mails: Many (pre-populating Google+ circles, training a great spam filter, Priority Inbox, great search, decently appropriate and well-targeted ads)

Niten 15y ago

I disagree on most points... 1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public newsgroups and forums. 2. It's a matter of preference. I too use Mail.app primarily, but I like being able to SSH to my server and read my mail in Mutt. As nice as Gmail's UI is in many regards, it's useless for threaded discussions on mailing lists. 3. Err, ever heard of procmail or maildrop, among (many) others? This is one of the major advantages of running your own mail server, actually; Gmail gives you very limited filtering options, especially when it comes to mailing lists. 4. Gmail has great spam filtering, but I find my Postgrey + SpamAssassin setup to work just as well.

aethr 15y ago
And in my experience, OP has it right. 1. Setting up the mail server is not the issue. It's the ongoing maintenance to ensure close to 100% uptime so you don't lose any mail. Having worked as a sysadmin maintaining linux boxes for several companies, mail server maintenance accounted for the vast majority of the hours we spent working on servers. This doesn't even account for the hardware upkeep to keep RAID sets in good shape, tape backups, etc. 2. There is simply no open source project that offers a UI anywhere close to as good as gmail. Yes, someone could take on that project, but it will be years before they achieve a similarly polished result. 3. Sure you could roll your own filtering that would be more effective than gmail's, for you. Again, this is further work that you have to do whereas gmail "just works". 4. SpamAssassin is one of the great open source projects in my opinion. Combined with ClamAV you can get a really robust solution that works fairly well. However (afaik) it lacks the learning heuristics that gmail's huge body of data can provide to keep even the newest template spam out of your inbox. This is not to say that I don't agree with some of your points, but in my opinion the OP has a valid perspective, which I suspect many IT people who value their own time will share.
- Niten 15y ago
  I do value my own time, and I'll say it again – post setup, I really spend no appreciable time keeping my mail server running. My VPS provider handles all hardware issues (with zero downtime in the last two years), backups consist of a nightly cron job and require no manual intervention, and the last time I touched my Postfix configuration was over a year ago. "Rolling my own filtering" consists of placing a single mailbox_command line in the Postfix configuration file, it hardly qualifies as a time sink. Writing mail filters for procmail takes no more time than doing so in Gmail, the difference is that the former lets you write much more expressive and fine-grained rules. And yes, SpamAssassin does have a built-in learning Bayesian classifier. Which I previously used to learn from anything that I manually classified as spam, but these days I don't even get any spam to invoke it on. See sa-learn(1) for details.

finnw 15y ago

I haven't used Mail.app since an incident about 2 years ago where it deleted a bunch of my messages. I was moving them from one folder to another when the connection to the server dropped. I don't know why this should happen with IMAP (it is possible to move messages from one folder to another atomically) but it did.