On 20 September 2017 at 12:46, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I tried running my own server on
mcvoy.com but
eventually gave up, the
spam filtering was a non-ending task.
I ran my own server for
bsdimp.com and
village.org form the early 90s
until 2009 or so. I switched to gmail when I was seriously looking at
dropping $10k for a server that had enough horse power to filter the
50k-75k spam I was getting a month at that time. Switching to google was
easier and I didn't have to spend the $10k nor the 4 hours a week on the
care and feeding of the black lists, etc.
This is essentially what happened when I was working at Oberlin College.
Around 2005-2006 we bought a dedicated appliance to handle spam (with
around 5000 active email addresses at any given time, it was a lot of spam)
but within less than a year it became completely overwhelmed and we needed
to upgrade to a much more powerful and expensive machine. We switched to
Google Apps very shortly afterward and it saved countless hours on the back
end and provided a better experience to our users. Initially I wasn't
particularly happy about the fact that we were no longer directly in
control of our mail, but the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks.
-Henry