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Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

Spammers and abuse.

I used to run personal email server some years ago. The spam was harder and harder to manage - first local SpamAssasin was fine, the I had to tweak rules, then I tried distributed filtering (DCC)... and then I gave up and started paying for Fastmail. This ended up working much better than I could ever do.

Usenet was similar -- I remember looking at the newgroups which were at more than half spam (and some were 95%+ spam) and then just leaving for forums. (plus there were a major UX annoyance: unlike with email, there is no simple way to sync read status across multiple devices)

Our free(digital) land has been killed by a handful of bad actors. I no longer believe in "free for all" systems. The best we can do is many independent systems, each with its own rules and policies.

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I run my own mail server with only Spamassassin for filtering, and I get little spam to my inbox in spite of my e-mail address being posted in plaintext across the internet. It has sufficed to 1) simply activate distributed filtering within Spamassassin, and 2) set a slightly more stringent standard than the default for regarding a message as ham, since any legitimately sent message will easily meet that higher standard. I also fed my entire e-mail archive to sa-learn, and what spam I occasionally get I also feed to sa-learn.

In ten years of running this mail server, I have only had one persistent spammer I couldn’t manage to get filtered with these settings, but then I just created a custom rule.

And _that's_ the work that is needed to have a spam-free-ish setup. Why can't FOSS ship these defaults and do these trainings semi automatically? Something totally could based on specific folder contents, but nothing does, it's always this "reinvent the wheel"-type of stuff.

Spamassassin is storage-agnostic, at heart it is just a script that takes messages piped through stdin. It doesn’t know where your preexisting e-mail archive is stored on disk. Storage is done by either your IMAP server or your e-mail client, and obviously it is up to you to tell Spamassassin where those messages are for Bayesian training.

Yep, that's the problem, it doesn't know. But for a good product it should know, these things should be possible to integrate trivially with the result being both reliable and automated.

Lucky you. I am not sure what I did differently, but I had those (including a custom script to run sa-learn on my "spam" folder), and ended up with close to dozens of spam messages per day anyway.

Greylisting and DNSRBL always worked sufficiently well for me, in addition to Spamassasin.

I think worst than the spam problem is the deliverability problem. Worst case I can hit the delete key on spam. (as an aside, most of it is immediately obvious from the subject line alone, which makes it hard to believe that it's such a hard problem). But getting mail delivered from a private server to major email providers like gmail, yahoo, outlook, is difficult.

... and "deliverability problem" is caused by spam. Because if it were easy to get mail delivered, spammers would do this.

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