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Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

A small but important detail regarding Migadu: it's impossible to run their spam filter in a fully permissive mode. Some checks (presumably SMTP time like SPF) cannot be disabled, preventing the recording of all incoming spam. That's fine if you want to depend on their spam filter, but if the point of moving from Gmail is to avoid megaprovider lock-in, complete visibility of spam is needed to train an equivalent filter that does not belong to any service.

It's possible I'll eventually move on from Migadu due to this, even though there is otherwise a lot to love about the service.

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I appreciate the concern.

In my particular case, a strong spam filter currently seems desirable. I've (tried to) train spam filters in the past and that's one of the few reasons I was still relying on Google Workspaces up until recently was as one piece in a rube goldberg "megaprovider" spam filter.

Though from what I see most of what Migadu is providing that cannot be turned off (SPF, DKIM, etc) are today considered best practices that you should add even if you were self-hosting, and the spam they prevent should be off your filters radar anyway, leaving your filter to better train on documents that aren't so bottom-of-barrel. (They are also, to my knowledge best practices to implement if you don't want to be entirely black-holed by the "megaproviders" as a self-host.)

I want SPF/DMARC etc. results as features alongside all other message content, and overrides (like whitelisting, clicking "not spam") to apply similarly. Valid SPF/DMARC is so commonplace in spam that it's not worth treating specially, there are much more reliable indicators (e.g. domain age, Google safe browsing list, Phishtank) that in a variety of cases a user might still want to override.

I'm actively playing with this stuff so probably my requirements are a bit special, but even aside from that, it does still feel quite irksome that all mail input can't be cleanly recorded.

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