5 ms·

Would love to get Google and all the big companies' fingers out of my life, but spam is overwhelming today. Would love to see a robust tutorial to show us how

Would love to get Google and all the big companies' fingers out of my life, but spam is overwhelming today. Would love to see a robust tutorial to show us how to really do spam protection right.

dewey 2y ago
You don’t have to choose between big tech and self hosting though. There’s thousands of medium sized, sustainable businesses that host your email for money and provide human support on top. One of the good ones would be Fastmail but there’s many more.
- brongondwana 2y ago
  I dunno if there's thousands. Maybe if you include ISPs! There's certainly quite a few though. (and thanks for the Fastmail plug)
simpaticoder 2y ago
I wonder if anyone has tried training an LLM on known spam and measured it's performance? Such an LLM would ideally be run local to the mail server for maximum privacy.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I don’t know why that would be necessary. The vast majority of the spam I get is obviously spam from the subject line alone.
  - ninjin 2y ago
    Ignoring e-mail content and throwing Naive-Bayes on the header alone is pretty much hove we got amazing spam filters about 15 years ago. All of course using a millionth or less of the resources a large language model would use.
- b112 2y ago
  Sir! The willies you just gave me have no compare. What if said AI gains sentience, but trained on that data?!
- creshal 2y ago
  rspamd has had an option for it for a while, but the older markov chain based filters tend to work well enough.
kijiki 2y ago
I'm on Debian stable, not OpenBSD, but SpamAssassin + razor + pyzor works really well. Roughly 1 spam per month, and 1-2 false positives a year. This is for an email address that has been used and openly spread widely for 25+ years. The real work is making sure that outbound mail gets delivered, but even that is just making sure you have a clean IP and setting up reverse DNS + DMARC/SPF/DKIM...
- jamal-kumar 2y ago
  Nice never heard of those until now. Link for anyone here cause it's kinda hard to google razor email filter for some reason. What does that setup have over amavisd? https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/razor2-pyzor-spamcop-and-dcc-setup-251.html https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/razor2-pyzor-spa... I investigated further and these don't really seem to be incredibly active projects, you sure this is the best solution? https://github.com/toddr/Razor2-Client-Agent https://github.com/toddr/Razor2-Client-Agent https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/tree/release-1-0-0 https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/tree/release-1-0-0
  - kijiki 2y ago
    > you sure this is the best solution? No, but I've been using it without issues for close to 25 years.
    - jamal-kumar 2y ago
      Love hearing when old code does just fine after that much years to be honest. Very impressive
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  To send an outbound email today you must have a special skill set and years of carefully built reputation. I just outsource it to smtp2go.
  - ninjin 2y ago
theK 2y ago
I've been running a private mail server since the early 00s, spam protection has actually improved drastically in the past ten years or so. For the most parts, SPF and dkim make it very easy for servers to identify scam, for everything else rspamd and clamd seem to take care of the rest. If you don't want to run a completely custom setup, there's projects like mailcow out there that can do the heavy lifting for you. I really don't see a quantitative or qualitative difference between the gmail experience and mine, with the caveat that my setup doesn't label ham from other private mail servers as spam (arguably a good thing)
- stackghost 2y ago
  The big thing is that you're presumably already established, which means your IP/ASN is clean and "warm". I self hosted for several years and gave up because even with a clean ASN, I simply wasn't sending enough emails to keep my reputation score high enough, and so deliverability into the big players (Microsoft in particular) was very spotty. Email isn't that hard it's just laborious to administrate.
  - alchemist1e9 2y ago
    > I simply wasn't sending enough emails to keep my reputation score high enough I’ve used a smaller hosting company for over 25 years run by a competent admin and it’s now dying a slow death I believe exactly because of this reputation problem from infrequent outbound emails from my domain. I don’t know what to do tbh because putting my fate in big tech seems super dangerous. Anyway, everyone is worried about spam but the real problem is sending and having people at outlook.com and gmail.com actually receive your emails!
    - speakspokespok 2y ago
      I tried hosting my own email server again earlier in the year. I’d forgotten the process so when googling around I found numerous YouTube videos of spammers doing this themselves … Get a clean IP and start long form email threads between this new domain and personal Gmail / outlook accounts: checking ‘this is not spam’, and coherent responses. They also mention getting DKIm and SPF working. The need for separate caldav , and all the major cloud providers blocking port 25 bummed me out.

Would love to get Google and all the big companies' fingers out of my life, but spam is overwhelming today. Would love to see a robust tutorial to show us how to really do spam protection right.

dewey 2y ago

You don’t have to choose between big tech and self hosting though. There’s thousands of medium sized, sustainable businesses that host your email for money and provide human support on top. One of the good ones would be Fastmail but there’s many more.

brongondwana 2y ago
I dunno if there's thousands. Maybe if you include ISPs! There's certainly quite a few though. (and thanks for the Fastmail plug)

simpaticoder 2y ago

I wonder if anyone has tried training an LLM on known spam and measured it's performance? Such an LLM would ideally be run local to the mail server for maximum privacy.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I don’t know why that would be necessary. The vast majority of the spam I get is obviously spam from the subject line alone.
- ninjin 2y ago
  Ignoring e-mail content and throwing Naive-Bayes on the header alone is pretty much hove we got amazing spam filters about 15 years ago. All of course using a millionth or less of the resources a large language model would use.
b112 2y ago
Sir! The willies you just gave me have no compare. What if said AI gains sentience, but trained on that data?!
creshal 2y ago
rspamd has had an option for it for a while, but the older markov chain based filters tend to work well enough.

kijiki 2y ago

I'm on Debian stable, not OpenBSD, but SpamAssassin + razor + pyzor works really well. Roughly 1 spam per month, and 1-2 false positives a year. This is for an email address that has been used and openly spread widely for 25+ years. The real work is making sure that outbound mail gets delivered, but even that is just making sure you have a clean IP and setting up reverse DNS + DMARC/SPF/DKIM...

jamal-kumar 2y ago
Nice never heard of those until now. Link for anyone here cause it's kinda hard to google razor email filter for some reason. What does that setup have over amavisd? https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/razor2-pyzor-spamcop-and-dcc-setup-251.html https://notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-notes-185/razor2-pyzor-spa... I investigated further and these don't really seem to be incredibly active projects, you sure this is the best solution? https://github.com/toddr/Razor2-Client-Agent https://github.com/toddr/Razor2-Client-Agent https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/tree/release-1-0-0 https://github.com/SpamExperts/pyzor/tree/release-1-0-0
- kijiki 2y ago
  > you sure this is the best solution? No, but I've been using it without issues for close to 25 years.
  - jamal-kumar 2y ago
    Love hearing when old code does just fine after that much years to be honest. Very impressive
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
To send an outbound email today you must have a special skill set and years of carefully built reputation. I just outsource it to smtp2go.
- ninjin 2y ago

theK 2y ago

I've been running a private mail server since the early 00s, spam protection has actually improved drastically in the past ten years or so. For the most parts, SPF and dkim make it very easy for servers to identify scam, for everything else rspamd and clamd seem to take care of the rest. If you don't want to run a completely custom setup, there's projects like mailcow out there that can do the heavy lifting for you. I really don't see a quantitative or qualitative difference between the gmail experience and mine, with the caveat that my setup doesn't label ham from other private mail servers as spam (arguably a good thing)

stackghost 2y ago
The big thing is that you're presumably already established, which means your IP/ASN is clean and "warm". I self hosted for several years and gave up because even with a clean ASN, I simply wasn't sending enough emails to keep my reputation score high enough, and so deliverability into the big players (Microsoft in particular) was very spotty. Email isn't that hard it's just laborious to administrate.
- alchemist1e9 2y ago
  > I simply wasn't sending enough emails to keep my reputation score high enough I’ve used a smaller hosting company for over 25 years run by a competent admin and it’s now dying a slow death I believe exactly because of this reputation problem from infrequent outbound emails from my domain. I don’t know what to do tbh because putting my fate in big tech seems super dangerous. Anyway, everyone is worried about spam but the real problem is sending and having people at outlook.com and gmail.com actually receive your emails!
  - speakspokespok 2y ago
    I tried hosting my own email server again earlier in the year. I’d forgotten the process so when googling around I found numerous YouTube videos of spammers doing this themselves … Get a clean IP and start long form email threads between this new domain and personal Gmail / outlook accounts: checking ‘this is not spam’, and coherent responses. They also mention getting DKIm and SPF working. The need for separate caldav , and all the major cloud providers blocking port 25 bummed me out.