cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46161145
I’ve been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.
However I’m currently in the process of moving and as a result I’ve had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.
Since it’s been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?
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Since switching from Gmail three years ago to Proton, I’ve not had a single spam mail. I also use aliases most places so that I can disable it if I start receiving spam on one.
Get a domain name and use that for your email; most providers let you set a catch-all that delivers everything to one place. So if you got, say, strawberrypigtails.egg you could give every service you sign up for a different address: ebay@strawberrypigtails.egg, sdf.org@strawberrypigtails.egg, pornhub@strawberrypigtails.egg and so on. Then, when you start getting loads of spam, you can look at where the email was sent to rather that where it came from and either take action against that service or just block emails sent to that address.
My “important” emails work on a white list basis. So every sender not approved by me goes to spam. When I’m waiting for an email I’ll check the spam folder for it and white list the sender.
First layer is done by Postscreen (by Postfix). It watches bots misbehaving, check blackhole DNS and disconnects them. Fail2ban takes care of bots who cause errors and warnings in logs and bans them. Third layer is SPF and DKIM. If it does not match, it’s getting flagged.
If someone conforms to protocols and passes the tests, there is still rspamd on the fourth layer. It does zillions of checks on the metadata and additionally learns via bayes. Dovecot moves all the crap to Junk and inserts the valid mails into their proper folders.
The fifth layer is me. If some junk mail arrives in the inbox, I move it to Junk manually and Dovecot tells rspamd to learn it as spam.
Well… Been using Proton since 2020 and ever since that I don’t have spam issues. I am also using aliases, so if somebody sends me way too many newsletters I just disable the alias. This probably won’t help you, but you asked 😀
Hard SPF and DKIM enforcement helps.
Enforcing TLS filters out a lot of spam connectikns too. Every legit provider has a cert these days.
I recently looked at my emails spam filters and my goodness. I’ve built a monstrosity over a few decades here.
My mailserver runs on Stalwart. Whatever it does works for me. I haven’t yet had to change the defaults. It’s also very easy to set up and requires next to no maintenance.
(It also does JMAP, which is like IMAP, but modern and efficient)
Unfortunately JMAP isn’t supported (yet) by a lot of email clients. I don’t think there’s a good open-source email suite for computers available… But I’ve tried Stalwart as well and it’s really sleek and seems to come with good defaults.
Sure, not widely supported, but if you use clients supporting it, it is great. Blazingly fast, while IMAP is always slow.
Also, Thunderbird is working on JMAP support: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/09/state-of-the-thunder-mozilla-connect-updates/
Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.
I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great, too.
Ltt.rs works quite well on Android. Even without a client I’d be glad to have it already, I’m ready when Thunderbird is ready.
