On: Leaving Gmail Behind (2013)

[hollerith]

>So here we are in the data silo era, where running your own mailserver is seen as something as archaic as soldering your own CPU board.

That might have happened even if gmail and hotmail had never been created. The deluge of spam is the main force behind the difficulty of running a mail server, particularly an outgoing-mail server.

[davidw → hollerith]

Yeah, I switched to Gmail a while back exactly because of the spam issue. Google does a really good job with that.

[nfoz → davidw]

My Gmail inbox spam (for an account I barely use) is much worse than my private-server email inbox which is my primary email. shrug

[derekp7 → nfoz]

That's because spammers are doing every combination of first-initial last-name, vice versa, and many other patterns, @gmail.com. The problem I have with a personal domain is when I set up a wildcard address. I'll now get 5000 copies of the same spam message to random_names@mydomain.com.

[jacquesm → hollerith]

You could centralize the anti-spam measure but keep the mail servers decentralized. Spamhaus is such a service.

[noblethrasher → jacquesm]

Lamentably, we also have to worry about spam black/whitelist.