[TUHS] Who is running their own mail server and what do you run?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Wednesday, 20 September 2017 at 10:46:19 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> I ran my own server for bsdimp.com and village.org form the early
> 90s until 2009 or so.

I've been running my own server since 1992, first sendmail, then
postfix.  And yes, the only issue is spam.

> I switched to gmail when I was seriously looking at dropping $10k
> for a server that had enough horse power to filter the 50k-75k spam
> I was getting a month at that time.

My issue with spam filtering wasn't horsepower, which was only a
fraction of what you mention, but accuracy.  Spam was continually
getting through, legitimate messages were being marked as spam.  None
of the conventional methods, such as header analysis, were accurate
enough, and they required continual tweaking.  In addition, it seems
that Spamassassin passed its use-by date some years back.  See
http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jan2010.php#D1-10 : on 1 January 2010
I received a bounce with the message:

 3.2 FH_DATE_PAST_20XX      The date is grossly in the future.

That was fixed, of course, but it remained a pain.

> Switching to google was easier and I didn't have to spend the $10k
> nor the 4 hours a week on the care and feeding of the black lists,
> etc.

I felt very embarrassed, but I did something similar.  I now use gmail
as a spam filter, while retaining my own mail server.  Clearly
maintaining spam filtering is enough work that it should be left to
people who do it for a job.  But at least my headers show that the
mail comes from a lemis.com mail server.

Greg
--
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