3 ms·

Spam is one aspect of why email is hard, and having more than just a few email accounts on your host helps to tackle that problem. Take a look in your Gmail spa

by jfoster 14y ago

Spam is one aspect of why email is hard, and having more than just a few email accounts on your host helps to tackle that problem. Take a look in your Gmail spam folder at how much they've managed to weed out.

brdrak 14y ago
I self host my personal email and have to use gmail at work. Spam is actually the one thing that I find gmail weaker at compared with self hosting. My nearly stock Postfix setup with a few basic anti-spam settings, rejects about 80% of spam. Then stock SpamAssassin config (with a nightly sa-update cron job) gets accuracy somewhere into the 90s. The SpamAssassin Bayes plugin takes it to very close to 100% (maybe 2 or 3 Spams per year). The best part is that I'm in control -- when someone continues to send annoying email even after being asked to stop (like our daughter's old childcare provider), I can add a Postfix rule to reject their mail at SMTP time and enjoy knowing that for every email they send, they'll get a Non-delivery report from their SMTP server complete with a personal message from me. Another example: an acquaintance liked to send mass mailers to everyone in his address book of the quality on par with most people's facebook/twitter status updates, followed by a barrage of useless replies from people I don't know. After realizing I never want to see those kinds of messages from anyone, I added a regex to Postfix header_checks to reject messages with more that 15 @ symbols in To: or Cc:. Another benefit of self hosting is unlimited temporary email aliases (e.g. temp123@example.com). Many places don't accept the standard myemail+temp123@example.com sub-address that gmail supports (and a spammer can easily identify), and it's nice to be able to tell when companies abuse my email.
spc476 14y ago
I have a GMail account but I don't use it. All I get is spam email. And yes, GMail finds a ton, but my inbox, which should be empty (or with very few emails from people thinking I'm someone I'm not) and it is not (granted, I only check once or twice a year, but I should not end up with over 100 messages in the inbox).

by jfoster 14y ago

brdrak 14y ago

I self host my personal email and have to use gmail at work. Spam is actually the one thing that I find gmail weaker at compared with self hosting. My nearly stock Postfix setup with a few basic anti-spam settings, rejects about 80% of spam. Then stock SpamAssassin config (with a nightly sa-update cron job) gets accuracy somewhere into the 90s. The SpamAssassin Bayes plugin takes it to very close to 100% (maybe 2 or 3 Spams per year). The best part is that I'm in control -- when someone continues to send annoying email even after being asked to stop (like our daughter's old childcare provider), I can add a Postfix rule to reject their mail at SMTP time and enjoy knowing that for every email they send, they'll get a Non-delivery report from their SMTP server complete with a personal message from me. Another example: an acquaintance liked to send mass mailers to everyone in his address book of the quality on par with most people's facebook/twitter status updates, followed by a barrage of useless replies from people I don't know. After realizing I never want to see those kinds of messages from anyone, I added a regex to Postfix header_checks to reject messages with more that 15 @ symbols in To: or Cc:. Another benefit of self hosting is unlimited temporary email aliases (e.g. temp123@example.com). Many places don't accept the standard myemail+temp123@example.com sub-address that gmail supports (and a spammer can easily identify), and it's nice to be able to tell when companies abuse my email.

spc476 14y ago

I have a GMail account but I don't use it. All I get is spam email. And yes, GMail finds a ton, but my inbox, which should be empty (or with very few emails from people thinking I'm someone I'm not) and it is not (granted, I only check once or twice a year, but I should not end up with over 100 messages in the inbox).