Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

I see a dozen spam emails per day at most, there are weeks when I do not see spam at all. This is not a big price to pay for independence. The rest is caught by spamassassin. I retrained it several years ago last time.

Sometimes I miss being part of a larger network of email providers that share spam signatures, but not enough to start searching.

View on HN

That sucks. All I can say us that I run spamassassin and never lose mails. I receive some marketing on my info@ and webmaster@ aliases, mostly for SEO. But fortunately there isn't much coming in. I use custom aliases for registrations and such so I can notify the source in case my associated mail address with them is being spammed. But that rarely happens. I've never had to block an address, spam always stopped coming in after 2-3 mails when it leaked from somewhere.

It's probably good not to have html / load external media enabled. Makes the address seem inactive because tracking mechanisms won't work (e.g. tracking pixels [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

Using mutt to read mail definitely helps.

> a dozen spam emails per day

Jesus Lord. I don't receive that much email in a week, legitimate plus spam combined.

I get what you're saying about independence, but using your own domain and pointing MX to any decent email service gets you 90% there with way less pain IMHO.

How much of that difference is because your external email provider is silently swallowing the most egregious spam such that you don’t even realise they’ve done so? I suspect the folks who run their own are monitoring all the email with none being missed from their stats.

This. Most inbox providers filter a lot of mail -- spam as well as occasional legitimate email -- without the recipients ever finding out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com