I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year.
Why? I have two VPSs with the main and backup SMTP servers and with continuous replications of emails between them and I pay less than half. Not to mention they double as web servers, IRC bouncers, etc.
And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.
I probably never get the same traffic as you do, but to me the best decision I made was enabling catch-all and using different addresses for each service out there.
In my case, spammers only send to three types of addresses:
- Random (jumble of numbers and letters@mydomain): very easy to block with a couple of programming lines.
- Fake but plausible (support@, bob@): just blacklist them once.
- Leaked (from websites and such): same as above, nuke it. Only happened to me once.
All in all, I never had to set up SpamAssassin or deal with dropped emails because of untrusted sources. Blocking by destination is much cleaner.
Why? I have two VPSs with the main and backup SMTP servers and with continuous replications of emails between them and I pay less than half. Not to mention they double as web servers, IRC bouncers, etc.
And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.
I probably never get the same traffic as you do, but to me the best decision I made was enabling catch-all and using different addresses for each service out there.
In my case, spammers only send to three types of addresses:
- Random (jumble of numbers and letters@mydomain): very easy to block with a couple of programming lines.
- Fake but plausible (support@, bob@): just blacklist them once.
- Leaked (from websites and such): same as above, nuke it. Only happened to me once.
All in all, I never had to set up SpamAssassin or deal with dropped emails because of untrusted sources. Blocking by destination is much cleaner.