Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhugo | Hacker News Reader

Spam has become much easier to avoid on inbound mail at some point. I turned off all Bayesian/heuristic based spam filtering around 2015 and now just check SPF and DKIM, and have a fake first MX record. No "Junk" folder, everything that passes the checks goes to the inbox. I get maybe one spam mail every week or so, which I just delete.

View on HN

Could you please elaborate on the "..., and have a fake first MX record" ?

Legitimate SMTP servers will try your domain's MX records one by one, in order of priority, until they reach one that accepts the message. Spammers' scripts usually don't bother, they just try the first one and move on to the next address on their list.

Of course, this is not 100% reliable, as it's not too difficult for spammers to adapt and improve their scripts. Of course, vast majority of spammers are either not sophisticated enough, or do not care enough to do so, so if you don't mind your incoming mail to be slightly delayed, it's kind of a low-hanging fruit, as it cuts off a huge amount of low-effort spammers.

Not GP, but I think what they meant is having a MX record with a higher priority pointing to an unroutable IP

    blackhole  IN A 240.0.0.1

    @ MX 10 blackhole.example.com
    @ MX 20 mail.example.com

Yup, exactly, for the reasons described in the sibling comment to yours.

Doing it this way doesn't even delay mail much most of the time; many legitimate MTAs connect immediately to the priority-20 MX after failing to connect to the priority-10 one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com