Life Wasted on Email

That was a bummer. I've spent the last several days setting up an email server. (grumble, grumble. I hate email).

The reason I am moving to a private server is that I am trying to figure out ways to reduce the amount of spoofed email sent my domain addresses.

I had pretty much stopped sending emails myself. I save all my sent emails. (minus test emails which I do delete). My primary email account shows that, In 2013, I sent 16 emails. In 2014 I sent 8 emails, and In 2015 I sent 1.

What happened to me is as follows: I am developing a number of community sites, which have a decent reputation.

I went with a premium web host run. The owner of the firm had a heart attack and died. His employees bought the firm and ran it into bankruptcy and a criminal spammer bought the assets and used my domains to engage in criminal spamming. The web host has access to the servers. Apparently he sent hundreds of millions of spams using my domains and signed up for every spammy email service available.

The result is that, even eight years after changing web hosts, I am deluged with spam.

I still get over 200,000 bounced emails a year. It is a complete nightmare for a person who doesn't like email to begin with.

I put the email on its own server because I want email quarantined from the rest of my doings and hopefully it will be easier to monitor.

The new email server is only working on my development account. It will be interesting to see how the configuration holds up with I point the production domains at it let the deluge begin.

Of course, I think it silly to have spent so much time and effort on email when I actually don't intend to use it for communication. The main thing I am trying to do is stop the spam that spoofs my domain in the sending address, and their is nothing I can do about that.

(Note, I have my domains marked up with http://www.openspf.org tags. My current web host says they have not detected spam actually coming from my account. I am hoping that by hosting my own account that I will be able to say definitively that no spam comes from my site.