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Comment by chr15m | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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