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I'm in the process of setting up my own email system but my biggest worry is incoming spam. One of the reasons (thee reason?) Gmail is so good at blocking spam

I'm in the process of setting up my own email system but my biggest worry is incoming spam. One of the reasons (thee reason?) Gmail is so good at blocking spam is because they have so many users using them that it becomes very easy to spot spam campaigns. But I also think it's true that the longer an email address is in use, the more targeted the spam becomes. Not because some evil script-kiddie turns his spambot up to 11, but because you'll start to get emails from legitimate people about things you're not interested in which aren't as easy to catch in a spam filter. Another reason Gmail is good at blocking spam is because the answer to "what is spam" is influenced by every single user who tags a message as spam, or doesn't tag a message as spam. This is another critical-mass benefit that a small scale provider can't currently provide. Given reputation systems and cryptography though, I also wonder if the only reason some kind of distributed email reputation database / system doesn't already exist (or isn't more widely known?) is because everyone assumes it isn't possible. <pipedream>What if it wasn't you and your email server trying to catch spam, but you and every other independent server admin who runs their own email server. When a new email comes in you could check the reputation of the sender, you could check the reputation on the domain of any links, et al. Reputations would be signed and you wouldn't immediately trust the reputation report from new users, and wouldn't even need to trust reputation reports from email servers controlled by admins you don't know.</pipedream> Edit: Typo, clarification

vitd 12y ago
Couldn't you use your small size to an advantage, though? For example, when I ran a mail server over a decade ago for a small business, there were a couple dozen accounts. I would get email attacks that looked like they were being sent to "a@example.com", "b@example.com", "c@example.com", etc. Anything that went to these obviously bogus addresses, was spam and could be removed from the legitimate accounts (and blacklisted, of course). I wonder if there are other ways you could use the small number of accounts as an advantage?

vitd 12y ago

Couldn't you use your small size to an advantage, though? For example, when I ran a mail server over a decade ago for a small business, there were a couple dozen accounts. I would get email attacks that looked like they were being sent to "a@example.com", "b@example.com", "c@example.com", etc. Anything that went to these obviously bogus addresses, was spam and could be removed from the legitimate accounts (and blacklisted, of course). I wonder if there are other ways you could use the small number of accounts as an advantage?