I’ve never been more inclined than now to do the same thing.

How do you deal with spam?

How do you ensure your emails don’t get junk mailed?

Been running my email infrastructure for IIRC about 8-9 years (with postfix).

Spam isn't much of a thing, which perpetually surprised me but there it is.

Some background: before I ran my own email server I relied on my ISP for receiving email for my domains and I was getting hundreds (even thousands) of spam messages a day. I used spamprobe to classify the spam away, very effectively. But that ISP must've had a very lenient smtp configuration.

With my own email server I enforce everything postfix supports enforcing at the time of the connection itself. Watching the postfix logs, I get multiple spam attempts per second but all of them are rejected before the connection attempt is accepted by postfix.

Actual spam that gets through that is minimal. About zero to five per week for me. I'm still using spamprobe to classify them just out of inertia, but the volume of spam is so low it isn't necessary.

As to outgoing email getting junked, it's harder to have exact statistics on this but it has never been an issue for me in the sense of not getting a response from someone, so they must've received it. You do need to configure SPF, DKIM, etc but aside from that, it's not a big deal. There are sites which help verify your configuration, use them.

Every time an smtp thread pops up on yc the difficulty of running your own email infrastructure is overstated. Of course I wouldn't recommend it to completely non-technical people, but if you have any interest in internet standards, just do it.

Own your infrastructure, help us all decentralize email and don't be the next victim of "gmail locked me out of my life and I have no one to call for help".

I've only been running it for about a year, but I simply don't get spam --- perhaps partially because it isn't my main email address.

I went by this article, https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/ but I only set up Postfix and the various DNS records (MX, DKIM, etc.). I didn't set up Dovecot because I just use Mutt on the same server. And I haven't bothered to set up any kind of spam filter.

Not parent, but I'm in the same boat with the self-hosted email VPS. I usually use Thunderbird as a client though, but sometimes mutt.

- SpamAssassin does a wonderful job after training it about once every 3 years. I get almost no spam.

- I was able to send to most people from my VPS, but not Charter. Charter blanket-blocked my ip block. So I ended up setting up SMTP forwarding via sendgrid free tier (100 emails per day). Now I always get through.

I operate my own server and SMTP forward using Mailjet and have had zero problems as well.

I'm not doing it right now, but the simple answers:

> How do you deal with spam?

You configure filters on your server so that they are flagged

> How do you ensure your emails don’t get junk mailed?

1. Ensure your server is running in a non-blacklisted IP block.

2. Just configure DKIM and SPF, other email servers should accept your emails without problem

For Gmail, DKIM is a must for deliverability. I initially only had SPF configured for my Postfix server, and Gmail just kept rejecting the SMTP connection.

Adding my mail setup to those listed here.

- Hosted locally.

- Virtual Windows Server 2012 R2 running on my Hyper-V host.

- Microsoft Exchange 2013

- Self written, internet facing MTA, that filters/rejects email before passing onto Exchange

- The MTA passes all email under X size through Spamassassin (SPAMD) running on a separate Ubuntu based virtual server

- The MTA also has some internal rules to straight up reject bad IPs and emails with 'badwords' in them.

- The MTA has an internal list of email aliases that it accepts email for, then it re-addresses them to the real internal email addresses that are configured in Exchange.

I've been running this setup in one form or another for about 20 years now, upgrading parts as I go along. Due to the version of Hyper-V I'm running, I can't run Windows Server 2016 or higher as virtual servers. Also, I've upgraded through Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2010 to 2013, but I tend to upgrade when I need to, not when there's a new version, hence still running 2013, which I only migrated to a few years ago.

It's the mail system for my whole family, plus handles the email for the 3 small companies that I run. Stability is more important than anything.

Outlook Anywhere is fully configured correctly - both iOS and Android can 'auto configure' for the mail server with just an email address and password.

I've got SPF and DKIM set-up, but send email through my ISPs smarthost just to be safe. Gmail and Outlook.com happily accept my emails without issue.

Regarding spam... This is the ongoing bugbear. No matter what you do, once you've been using an email address for a long time (in my case over 20 years for some of them) fighting spam is a constant battle. This weeks spam content is all about Air Conditioners and slimming aids.

I would NOT recommend that anyone set-up their own personal email system unless it was a learning exercise. It's just too much hassle these days. Personally, I'm am in the process of moving the whole lot to Office 365, which will cost me a bit more in yearly fees, but will give me some time back not having to admin it, which at this stage in my life is more important.

I'd suggest looking into https://mailinabox.email/

I also host my own email server. For the first several years, I didn't have a spam solution since I wasn't getting any. After it started coming (not in terrible amounts but enough to become a nuisance), I set up rspamd. It works nearly perfectly: all spam mail is correctly detected as such and legit email rarely ends up as junk (perhaps once in several months).

Same here, I was at university, and we used Pine too. I also wish the same. Often my colleagues find it strange I use a text-based program for email - as if 99% of communication online isn't using language.