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Comment by aendruk | Hacker News Reader

To offer one corroborating point, my email address is posted in cleartext on the front page of my website and it receives spam at a rate of less than one message per day.

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Another: Used the same email for ~2 decades, never hidden it, giving it out freely and available on lots of public websites including my own. Get around ~30 spam emails per day, all automatically marked as spam. Around 2-3 gets through my filter each month.

Difficult to extract any useful info from this post without specifying what or where your spam filter is. Does it run locally? On your own mail server? An ISP's default spam filter? Gmail? CPanel? Have you tweaked any settings?

We’ve been discussing observed rates of attempted spam, not the effectiveness of downstream filters.

> not the effectiveness of downstream filters.

But he chose to mention that all spam were marked as such and that only 1 or 2 get through. Readers will naturally be curious what methodology and tools are in use.

“Difficult to extract any useful info from this post” reads as undue criticism, as if preemptive satisfaction of your curiosity about the tangent was compulsory.

I disagree that the criticism is "undue"... a post that waves off spam as if it's a non-issue ("2-3 each month"), when in fact many people do struggle with it, helps nobody. A post actually explaining how you built or configured an effective spam filter, however, benefits the HN community.

Is that pre or post IP filter attempted spam?

Or what I'm saying is, if the SMTP server blocks by IP first before determining what mail is being delivered then the actual rate of potential spam to any particular email address is not being discovered.

For my case above we have a decent explanation of the “SMTP stage” policy [1] but no visibility into its actual metrics.

[1]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591393

The conversation was about how many spam messages we received, not how many were caught or how. But since you're curious: sendmail + SpamAssassin, running on my own server.

But you specifically mentioned the percentage of messages which are marked as spam, and how many get through your filter. If you choose to include that info, people are going to have questions.

My experience is similar; I have my personal email, which has been in use since the early 00s, in almost plain text (@ replaced with <at>) on the about page of a fairly popular site which gets several million visits a month. I only get 5-10 spam messages/day, most of which are filtered without issue. I do get a decent amount of email, but not true 'spam'. It's mostly just crap I've signed up for over the years and can't be bothered to get rid of.

I honestly get more at my work email, which has never been posted anywhere... I wonder if spammers have started to assume the easy to get email addresses are suspicious or not valuable for various reasons.

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