On 20 September 2017 at 12:46, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@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