DrBacchus' Journal

Yesterday I switched email for my primary domain over to GMail. I have a dozen email addresses and a few distribution lists, and I moved about a half million email messages over to my GMail folders.

It's probably too early to sing its praises, since it's only been 12 hours, but ...

This morning, it was eerily quiet in my inbox. No strident calls to buy a genuine fake Roles, or increase the size and strength of various body parts. No encouragement to get my website to the top of the search results, or make a million dollars by helping out a long-lost relative in Uzbekistan.

It was rather like walking down the main street in a big city, but not being jostled by grubby passers-by, and not hearing the sound of cars, gunshots, hawkers, screaming children, barking dogs, or howling sirens, but being able to hear the polite, soft-spoken conversation of the well-dressed gentleman walking beside you.

I looked over in the Spam folder, and all the noise was there, where it should be, but as far as I could tell, none of the polite conversation had made it over there by mistake.

I think I'm going to like it here.

I just flipped the switch, and pointed the MX records for RCBowen.com at GMail. I've been running my own mail server for about 15 years now, and this is the first time I've trusted anybody else to handle @rcbowen.com email. We'll see how it goes. I sincerely hope that the outcome is less spam.

By far the most painful part of the process was migrating a half-million email messages from my IMAP server over to Google, and trying to get all the same folders and filtering rules set up. But, in the process, I deleted probably another quarter of a million email messages. Ye gods I have a lot of email.

And, yet, after all that, I'm only using 5% of my capacity on GMail.

Fitz notes that his email address appears 960 places on the web. I'm at 2630. This is one of the reasons that I'll very soon (hopefully tomorrow) switch my primary domain over to the Google for Domains service (or whatever they're calling it now), so that I can get out of the spam fighting business. I've spent an inordinate amount of time over the last 12 years or so trying to figure out how to get less spam to hit my inbox, and I'm all done. Google's got folks who do that full time, and, while I can't figure out why they would provide this to me for free, I'm perfectly willing to let them.

And, here's the results. You can, I'm sure, immediately pick out the point where I turned on the greylisting service. It's not a complete solution - I still get some spam - but you can see from the graph that I'm getting around 1/3 as much inbound mail as I was getting before.It's even more pronounced if you look at the month view

Notice that it affects the sent, as well as received, because so much of my outbound email was reject and bounce messages.

For quite some time, I've wanted to implement greylisting on my mail servers. But, to be honest, every time I looked at the greylisting howtos, they just made me feel stupid. Rather than telling me what to do to implement greylisting, they'd discuss the benefits of greylisting, and link to three other tutorials that did much the same thing. Some of them would partially describe an implementation, and leave the actual details to you, or perhaps reference a Perl script that may or may not be included in your particular MTA, and here's a partial copy of it which may or may not work.

So, every time I tried to implement it, I ended up giving up in disgust.

I've just discovered Greyfix, which is a greylisting policy daemon that gets enabled by adding a line to main.cf, and one to master.cf. It took me 5 minutes to download, compile, and enable, and I have received TWO pieces of spam since I enabled it, while still receiving all of my regular email that I expected to receive. It is, by far, the most effective spam prevention measure I have ever implemented, bar none.

The basic premise of greylisting is that when someone sends you email, rather than accepting it, you say "why don't you try that again a little later, ok?" If it's a spammer, they're trying to deliver millions of messages a minute, and the don't have time to come back and try later. If it's legitimate email, it gets put in the queue, and redelivered later. So it's delayed a little, no big deal. If it's someone that sends you a lot of email, then once they've successfully delivered something, they get put on the approved list, and don't have to wait the next time. The consequence is that almost all spam gets dropped as undeliverable, and everything that came from an actual mail server gets delivered.

A very simple concept, and it's always frustrated me that it was so difficult to actually implement. Turns out I was just looking at the wrong implementation.