[colug-432] Off site email hosting

[Rob Funk]

On Friday, February 27, 2004 07:13:10 AM Joshua Kramer wrote:
> > David - I know where you're coming from. At one time, I ran my mail
> > though a spam filter kit that I liken to the way the commercial spam
> > filters are built: using a layered defense strategy. I blocked known RBL
> 
> All I use is greylisting, and that kills most of the spam.  I have 1 or 2
> per day.

Ironic that your message triggered a SpamAssassin alert on your message, 
partly because the datestamp was "Feb 27, 2004".

Though I'm puzzled that it also scored 99% on the list's Bayes spam 
probability test. That points to some mistraining on the list side.

I'm using greylisting plus strict SMTP rules plus blacklisting plus 
spamassassin, and it looks like the vast majority of my blocking is due to no 
PTR record in DNS, followed by greylisting and blacklisting.
On the other hand, way too many websites don't do proper retries for their 
confirmation emails, so the greylisting gets in the way at times. And the 
blacklists aren't as good as they used to be; every so often I'll discover 
that one is blocking things it shouldn't, while they aren't as quick as I'd 
like to block things they should.

All that combined with the pain of trying to get my mail consistently accepted 
by places like Yahoo Mail has me considering moving to Gmail at some point.

I really hate that email has devolved to only working reliably if you use one 
of a few major services -- and even then sending between them can be dicey.