On 16 Feb 2010, at 1:49, Martin Pilkington wrote: > I was in a similar position as you a few weeks ago when I switched to > linode. However, I've not been a big fan of Google's spam filtering > which I often find unreliable and can't really be configured.
I only have experience as sender of email to users who use Google. The Google Postini Services¹ does seem to silently eat emails which then does not show up at the client, at least based on our experience corresponding with users and it seems to be echoed by Boomerang² users. It sucks when filters do this. If they think we are sending spam, they should reject the email during the SMTP session or they should flag it as spam for the user, not accept and drop. On a general note about mail, it is not that complicated to run postfix + dovecot (for IMAP) plus maybe spam assassin / procmail, and it gives lots of advantages, but then I hate the thought of outsourcing control as as I tend to use that control to improve my workflow, some examples related to email: License keys in general have a good chance of being flagged as spam, so it is nice being able to grep /var/log/mail.log — we have created a system to provide the user with exact session diagnostics and even interpreting the potential error/warning returned by their server (e.g. if it says “temporarily unavailable” we include a blurb about grey listing), if you have a TextMate license you can try request it on the following page and click the ‘diagnostics’ link to see it in action: http://license.macromates.com/request/ License keys also often bounce. It is great to have automated tracking of that as well. Our volume is big enough for me to have invested the time into a “change your email” service which takes a bounce from the old address as confirmation (of the change request): http://license.macromates.com/change Filtering: I sort my mail into various mail boxes based on what it is, I only run spam filters on the addresses which actually receive spam, I reject emails from known bad guys in our industry (lots of people want to send us their newsletter, advertising offers, and similar). Anyway, just my two cents… while most probably do not deal with the same email volume as me, I had no idea when I started that I would e.g. eventually end up hiring a guy to do support and therefor needed to “split” my IMAP account into two, but because I had full control over my email system it was no problem to do this, so also keep that in mind when picking an email solution, i.e. how well it will adapt to future needs. ¹ http://www.google.com/postini/ ² http://mainwiki.boomerang.com/index.php/Postini
