Hacker News Reader

Comment by samrus | Hacker News Reader

Yeah i have fantasies of having my own email server and stuff but the spam detection is probably the 3rd thing that would have me crawling back

View on HN

I have run my own mail server for years and I rarely see spam. I'm running a classic Bayesian filter as outlined in the legendary PG post "A Plan For Spam" and it works very well. I don't really get all the fuss about this issue. When I do see a piece of unclassified spam I simply classify it and continue. For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

> For me this is a far better tradeoff than having all my most private mail on some bigcorp server where any nerd can rifle through it.

You've functionally given yourself very little extra privacy because the vast majority of emails you send or receive will still cross through BigCorp servers (whether Google, Microsoft, Intuit, or other).

You can do the work to run your own mail server, but so few other people do that one end of the conversation is still almost always feeding a corporation's data lake.

I agree with you but I still run my own mail server. If people like me stopped doing that, we would cede the entire email landscape to BigCorp. A sad fate to happen to one of the true decentralized protocols. It's like if we all just went back to AOL

It's more expensive and difficult to hack or get a warrant to access multiple bigcorp servers with a variety of privacy stances and jurisdictions, than it is to get access to a single one. Security is about making attacks expensive.

No single BigCorp employee can go through all my mail.

If you're not convinced, no problem, please continue to enjoy your BigCorp email service.

And yet, if you're communicating with someone else who does the same (or uses a niche hosted provider), that entire conversation is outside their "data lake".

Yes, but such people are so rare that they're functionally non-existent. I certainly don't know even one.

Apart from self-hosting, you can choose a non-big-corp email service, which happens more often. Quite a few of my emails never get to big corps.

And they will become ever rarer when more of those who could do that follow your argumentation.

And this is why I take more and more of what I do offline

As someone who's run my own email for 25 years or so (I'm really getting old...) my biggest problem is not that I receive spam (spamassassin mostly takes care of it) but that my sent emails get marked as spam by big email providers. Yahoo is the worst offender and seems to do so at some base despite my best efforts (spf, dkim, arc, and jumping through their registration hoops)

I'm running my own mail server for longer than I'd like to admit, but not for my critical/key email addresses. Looking at the spam filtering I get in Gmail and knowing my endless fights with spamassassin and DSBLs I know I could never achieve that.

The only upside of having an actual mail server is the ability to say "this is incorrect, no one ever tried to send an email to this address/from this IP" or custom 55x messages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com