[runako]

1) Spam filtering. The Google spam filters are likely going to be orders of magnitude better than anything you run in-house.

2) You value your time. Some people don't, it's not really worth arguing this point. But it is a reason running a mail server is a bad idea for most people.

[ajross]

Orders of magnitude is an exaggeration. My account is very visible and very old, and gets 6-700 spam deliveries a day. Plain vanilla spamassassin catches 93% of those, and a little perl filter I wrote gets me to 98-99%. I get a handful of unwanted messages each day. That's just one order of magnitude from perfect; and I know for a fact gmail isn't perfect.

And #2 is just wrong, sorry. I spend minutes a week doing anything at all related to maintenance on that box (I use it far more regularly for productive purposes, though). If you can handle running a linux box from a console, you can learn to do it too. Or don't, it's up to you. But telling me I don't value my time is just out of line.

[runako]

Re #2: Sorry, I wan't directing that at you and meant no offense. Per your post:

>> I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time).

For those of us without the experience of 13 years running postfix and dovecot (and spamassassin and writing perl filters), there will certainly be at least some time investment. That's what I was talking about: the price in hours to go from zero to competent. You may be too competent by now at email hosting to realize that it would not be a minutes per week affair for most people to do well.

Obviously if it works for you, great. Interesting to note that you started running your own long before GMail; the calculus of starting to self-host is different now.

Re #1, you should lend your spam filtering tools to Yahoo! In all seriousness, a handful of unwanted messages per day would be a dramatic improvement to my Yahoo! inbox. Whatever they are doing over there is not as good as what you're running.

[anthonyb]

GMail isn't perfect. I usually get at least one spam per day, usually for stuff which should've been picked up by any decent spam filter (all caps, or "Hello I am Mr. Otogonoyu from Nigeria and I have US$4.8M to give you...")

I sometimes wonder if GMail lets these through for certain people, and relies on the "mark this as spam" button as some sort of mechanical turk...

[icebraining]

Spam filtering got much easier for me once I started using different emails for each website and person. You can just route that particular address to /dev/null without affecting the rest of your emails.