4 ms·

Sure, it takes 30 seconds to install postfix, but in practice, email is stupidly hard to admin because of spam. You may be able to send email easily, but a lar

Sure, it takes 30 seconds to install postfix, but in practice, email is stupidly hard to admin because of spam. You may be able to send email easily, but a large percentage will be blocked as spam unless you use a well know relay even if you do everything right. Similarly, you will also be fighting a flood of spam in the other direction.

eps 13y ago
> but a large percentage will be blocked as spam unless you use a well know relay even if you do everything right That's hardly a rule. You clearly will end up on a blacklist if you host from home or if your IP is already on a list due to previous spam activity, but of you run off a static IP in a decent colo and have a proper PTR record, it is more likely than not to be all OK. The 90% of inbound spam is still very effectively trimmed off by greylisting, i.e. postgrey if you are in postfix. I've been running my own mail server for close to 10 years now and it's really not a big deal.
mhurron 13y ago
Inbound spam : greylisting as stated elsewhere. Outbound : Use a smarthost. I host my own mail. I use OpenBSD as my Firewall/Router so it was a simple decision to use the spamd daemon on it for greylisting. The SMTP destination sits on a CentOS machine behind the OpenBSD gateway. I see a spam message maybe once every week or two. I have also used MailScanner to do SpamAssassin and virus scanning of received mail at places I have worked. The spam count went down so far I had people ask me if the mail server was down. A little bit of verification showed we weren't loosing legitimate mail, users were just getting so much spam they thought that was normal. A smarthost solves your outgoing problem. I can't send direct from my home connection because it is a residential IP and that is going to be blacklisted all over the place. I could use my IPS's SMTP server, hell you could use GMail if you wanted. I however, use a VPS I pay for. My SMTP server logs in (password) over a TLS connection (preshared certificates). It only relays for my mail server because of that. You don't need to use a well known relay, you just don't relay from a blacklisted IP. Don't leave an open relay and don't send directly from a residential IP block and you probably don't have to worry, unless you start sending spam. http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx has various tools to give you a view into how other mail servers will view your hosts.

eps 13y ago

> but a large percentage will be blocked as spam unless you use a well know relay even if you do everything right That's hardly a rule. You clearly will end up on a blacklist if you host from home or if your IP is already on a list due to previous spam activity, but of you run off a static IP in a decent colo and have a proper PTR record, it is more likely than not to be all OK. The 90% of inbound spam is still very effectively trimmed off by greylisting, i.e. postgrey if you are in postfix. I've been running my own mail server for close to 10 years now and it's really not a big deal.

mhurron 13y ago

Inbound spam : greylisting as stated elsewhere. Outbound : Use a smarthost. I host my own mail. I use OpenBSD as my Firewall/Router so it was a simple decision to use the spamd daemon on it for greylisting. The SMTP destination sits on a CentOS machine behind the OpenBSD gateway. I see a spam message maybe once every week or two. I have also used MailScanner to do SpamAssassin and virus scanning of received mail at places I have worked. The spam count went down so far I had people ask me if the mail server was down. A little bit of verification showed we weren't loosing legitimate mail, users were just getting so much spam they thought that was normal. A smarthost solves your outgoing problem. I can't send direct from my home connection because it is a residential IP and that is going to be blacklisted all over the place. I could use my IPS's SMTP server, hell you could use GMail if you wanted. I however, use a VPS I pay for. My SMTP server logs in (password) over a TLS connection (preshared certificates). It only relays for my mail server because of that. You don't need to use a well known relay, you just don't relay from a blacklisted IP. Don't leave an open relay and don't send directly from a residential IP block and you probably don't have to worry, unless you start sending spam. http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx has various tools to give you a view into how other mail servers will view your hosts.