> Gmail's search and spam-filtering are both very good, trained and tuned on datasets no self-hosted product could ever match (and harnessing parallel algorithms across large clusters that'd be quite costly on one machine)
As someone who self hosts, this is clearly not true. With gmail I was receiving a lot of spam from various email marketing companies like mailchimp, easymail, etc. There's a lot of these companies and they are mostly country specific, some less, some more shady.
With self hosting it is easy to block their servers en masse and forget about them. Some companies spam the DNS namespace with predictable, but extremely numerous domain names, which are easy to block using a few regular expressions. Try to make filters in gmail for that, if you don't know from which of the 100 domains the next email will come.
Email from hacked servers is also easy to block. It's mostly PHP servers and all you need to look for is mention of eval() in the headers as nobody sane hopefully evals PHP code to send email.
It just took me a month of spending a few minutes every other day analyzing headers of odd email or two which passes through some generic checks like checking if sending IP address has a domain name and figuring out how to block the sender entirely if possible.
Now I don't get any legitimately looking spam at all and what I get is easily filtered with bayes filter in thunderbird.
Anyway, with spam the hard job is checking the spam folder and that's annoying as hell with gmail, because it's always full of crap, and it's not easy to see occasional false positive. Now I only get 1 spam every two to three days and that's easy to check. Legitimate people who get blocked get bounce message immediately and have chance to re-send according to instructions in the bounce, instead of falling into spam folder and feeling ignored.
Actually what is hardest to filter is bounces from gmail servers. I'm not really sure how spammers generate them. They are not in response to anything that I send. It seems like google ignores my SPF records, even though it indicates that it found that the sender forged the From header and sends me the bounce with attached spam that is targeted at me anyway. Quite annoying.
EDIT: I guess I can just reject the gmail bounce if it contains the "Received-SPF: fail (google.com:". Ah!
I agree. I have been self-hosting my personal email since 1998, and there was a period when this was difficult due to technical issues related to encryption. But for the past decade or so those issues are gone. The benefits are great. For example, being able to block entire netblocks at the routing or firewall level is an amazing anti-spam tool that is completely free when you self-host.
As someone who self hosts, this is clearly not true. With gmail I was receiving a lot of spam from various email marketing companies like mailchimp, easymail, etc. There's a lot of these companies and they are mostly country specific, some less, some more shady.
With self hosting it is easy to block their servers en masse and forget about them. Some companies spam the DNS namespace with predictable, but extremely numerous domain names, which are easy to block using a few regular expressions. Try to make filters in gmail for that, if you don't know from which of the 100 domains the next email will come.
Email from hacked servers is also easy to block. It's mostly PHP servers and all you need to look for is mention of eval() in the headers as nobody sane hopefully evals PHP code to send email.
It just took me a month of spending a few minutes every other day analyzing headers of odd email or two which passes through some generic checks like checking if sending IP address has a domain name and figuring out how to block the sender entirely if possible.
Now I don't get any legitimately looking spam at all and what I get is easily filtered with bayes filter in thunderbird.
Anyway, with spam the hard job is checking the spam folder and that's annoying as hell with gmail, because it's always full of crap, and it's not easy to see occasional false positive. Now I only get 1 spam every two to three days and that's easy to check. Legitimate people who get blocked get bounce message immediately and have chance to re-send according to instructions in the bounce, instead of falling into spam folder and feeling ignored.
Much better experience overall.