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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

> 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.

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.

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