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Comment by brokensegue | Hacker News Reader

On Gmail I get maybe 1 spam a month max in my inbox (and it blocks many per day)

That's pretty good. I have no doubt that Gmail spam protection is better than my self-hosted SA protection. For me, independence from a somewhat suspicious large company for something as important as e-mail is worth it.

I have a gmail honeypot where I fetchmail junk email straight to my junk folder and have a scheduled sa-learn cronjob. Ever since I started this I essentially stopped getting junk email in my selfhosted inbox.

I also have dovecot set to learn Ham every time I file an email from the inbox to a folder for good measure.

So...statistically insignificant difference from SA for most mail users.

3-5 spams per week vs. 1 per month is a big difference

I got (if I'm reading this right) 5500 emails (junk+delivered) to my personal mail account from 12/01/2023 to 12/31/2023. So that's a minimum, since I don't see the ones that get flushed out before I even see them.

1 spam a month would be .018% of emails and 5 x 4 spams a month would be .364% of emails

So I would have gotten about .346% more spam based on the number of emails. In reality, because I don't see all of the mails, it's less. Is a touch more than a third of a percent a 'big difference'? YMMV.

It's a 20x difference... My annoyance by spam is unrelated to the detection rate and is entirely related to the number of spam emails I see

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