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by derefr
3402 days ago
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* Gmail's search and spam-filtering are both very good, trained and tuned on datasets no self-hosted product could ever match (and harnessing parallel algorithms across large clusters that'd be quite costly on one machine) * Google doesn't lose my email; I probably will lose my email, because an email server is backed by a database and doing database backups right is hard if that is not your day-job. * You can get a good email-receiving experience, but email-sending is very difficult these days if you're a nobody, because a lot of first-stage network-level spam filtering has come down to reputation, and your server IP won't have any (or, if it's a cloud provider IP, will have very likely been used at least once to send spam in the past.) And residential ranges get dinged, too, from the heuristic (stereotype) that the most likely reason to get an SMTP connection from a residential IP is that it's a member of a botnet. |
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As someone who self hosts, this is clearly not true. With gmail I was receiving a lot of spam from various email marketing companies like mailchimp, easymail, etc. There's a lot of these companies and they are mostly country specific, some less, some more shady.
With self hosting it is easy to block their servers en masse and forget about them. Some companies spam the DNS namespace with predictable, but extremely numerous domain names, which are easy to block using a few regular expressions. Try to make filters in gmail for that, if you don't know from which of the 100 domains the next email will come.
Email from hacked servers is also easy to block. It's mostly PHP servers and all you need to look for is mention of eval() in the headers as nobody sane hopefully evals PHP code to send email.
It just took me a month of spending a few minutes every other day analyzing headers of odd email or two which passes through some generic checks like checking if sending IP address has a domain name and figuring out how to block the sender entirely if possible.
Now I don't get any legitimately looking spam at all and what I get is easily filtered with bayes filter in thunderbird.
Anyway, with spam the hard job is checking the spam folder and that's annoying as hell with gmail, because it's always full of crap, and it's not easy to see occasional false positive. Now I only get 1 spam every two to three days and that's easy to check. Legitimate people who get blocked get bounce message immediately and have chance to re-send according to instructions in the bounce, instead of falling into spam folder and feeling ignored.
Much better experience overall.