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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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.
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.
I recently looked at my emails spam filters and my goodness. I’ve built a monstrosity over a few decades here.
LMAO! I would speculate that conservatively 90% of all my mail is spam that gets either rejected or dropped in the trash bin.
I use POPFile, open source software that classifies email into whatever categories you set up using a Bayesian algorithm (so you train it). It works as a proxy so it does it when your download email, so not a solution to your inbox filling up unless your can figure out how to run it on the server automatically.
It tags the email with a header and I use Thunderbird filters to move mail to folders for spam, adverts, political spam, and regular inbox.
It’s abandonware but it still works and doesn’t really need any more features IMO.
As @eksb@programming.dev said, SpamAssasin and diligent training. Also, pFsense will filter based on rules and criteria in conjunction with Suricata or Snort.
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 as well.
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.
spamassassin
There are some tweaks you can usually do on the server/host side as well. That’s particularly helpful if you use Thunderbird on multiple devices, such as desktop and phone.
Hopefully it will be even easier over time to sync settings between devices — I’d love to see filters and signatures across devices one day.
