Anecdote: although I have spamassassin set up to add a header to my email, my filter for moving likely spam into the appropriate folder is currently commented out, because I get so little spam. I get a very small amount at my public GitHub address, and a little more at one address that is in the source code of a FLO (free/libre/open) app I maintain, but it totals maybe one or two emails a month.

Public organizational emails in orgs I've been a part of (e.g. admin@example.com, community@example.com) get a little more spam, largely sales pitches from what appears to be actual humans at shady SEO companies. Maybe 2 a week.

I get way more "legitimate" corporate spam than actual unprompted/cold spam. The most egregious example in recent memory was when I made an online purchase at Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and made sure the "sign me up for the email list" checkbox was not selected. They sent me no fewer than four emails asking if I would like to sign up for their email list, including one titled, "Thanks for signing up for our email list!" (inside: "Just take this one last step to confirm your subscription <signup link>").

In conclusion, I perceive unwanted email to be largely a self-inflicted problem at present. For example, someone I know likes to complain about the quantity of email she receives, but also refuses to unsubscribe, because sometimes she sees something interesting in one of the many promotional lists she's on. I also don't understand people who say they're not bothered by advertising, but to each her own.

I'm not convinced Google really solved spam, they're just not afraid to turn the sensitivity on the filter way up even if that means a chunk of legitimate mail gets marked as spam. Most smaller admins seem concerned about correctness and so they don't do this.

I think this really sums up Google's M.O. in general.

This seems to be a rule - “inbound” decentralized systems are susceptible to the spam problem - but “outbound” ones like DNS seem to work OK. Nobody cares if you create fifty billion sub domains.

Spam seems pretty "solved" (if one can call it that) problem nowadays though. Most people who run their own servers simply put SpamAssassin and a couple of other tweaks; not much fuss is needed anymore.

I’ve occasionally wondered why the responsibility to mitigate abuse can’t be pushed all the way out to edge nodes (individual ISPs and data centers) instead of relying on centralized abuse prevention. I imagine this does happen for certain kinds of abuse, but wouldn’t the threat of others not peering with your node be good motivation for ISPs not to provide services to spammers?

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering.

I wish this meme could die. gmail spam filtering isn't particularly good, it never has been. They crank up the false positive rate high enough that the spam in your inbox is about comparable to other solutions, but at the expense of tons of false positives.

I've had a gmail account since the launch. Been there got the tshirt (literally.. have a tshirt of the launch when they were bragging about 1GB storage). I've also been managing email servers and mailing lists since the very early 90s to today.

Notice every site that interacts with email has the ubiquitous warning abot "check your spam folder"? Not solely, but largely a legacy of so many users on gmail getting used to so much legitimate email going to spam. it doesn't have to be that way.

You can easily to an order of magnitude better on fewer false positives while still getting less spam overall in your inbox, by running your own email servers.

I haven't had a false positive in ... certainly many years on my own email on my servers. And a bit less spam getting through than on the gmail account.

> Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

gmail has a big false positive problem, yes, but it isn't any worse for you as a sender if you run your own email servers. I experience more false positives emailing from work account to work account (both sides hosted by gmail) than from personal account (hosted by me) to gmail.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well

Spam filtering is actually not hard anymore. I've been running email servers and mailing lists from before spam existed, through its rise and later fall. There was a time, ca.2000, when it was hard. Because nearly every legitimate email server was misconfigured, so one had to allow it all through, but most was spam. So it took a lot of client side filtering.

These days, very easy. Legitimate senders are well configured, so just reject all misconfigured clients at the SMTP connection. There, that's 95%+ of spam blocked. The few remaining items are easily filtered by whichever bayesian filter you like. I'm using spamprobe. Done. No spam. No false positives.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good, very advanced, and trained on huge amounts of data. Something a normal person could never do on their own server

I'm sure most normal people could install SpamAssassin and configure it to use community blacklists on their Dovecot/Postfix server. It's not that hard.

> A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

> Spam filtering is a a very difficult thing to do well and Google's implementation was very good

How can these two sentences be true at the same time?

Google mail is used by so many because it has resources to make it free.

> Agreed and I will add that a huge reason Google is used by so many was very effective spam filtering. A huge reason why hosting your own email is hard? Getting filtered by Google because of the massive amount of spam they are blocking.

No. It is the domain. No one else in this business has a short pronounceable *mail.com