For the past six years I’ve used SpamAssassin as my primary e-mail filter. It worked beautifully and was a great learning experience from an IT standpoint. I was a vocal advocate for the software and felt my contribution to the open source community was in my clear, step-by-step tutorial on its installation. As a bonus, I received many thankful comments from Dreamhosters in response to those tutorials. The benefits were nice but time and convenience always triumph. That’s why I moved my mail to Google.

I kept my mail on Dreamhost for several reasons, the most paramount being security, privacy, and access. I truly felt it was my mail. I can do with it whatever I please. I’m sure my thinking is not unique in this regard. Not to offend anyone at Dreamhost or to question their integrity, but their administrators are no more trustworthy than those at Google. Like any data not residing on your own PC, it’s subject to inspection by absolutely anyone with sufficient privileges. I overcame that hesitation or fear, if you will.

I next asked myself what value I could derive from using SquirrelMail. Besides reading an e-mail and responding in plain text, there was nothing more. It was fine software but its development stalled in the 20th century. Using my custom SpamAssassin installation I was pushed into using an SSH client whenever I needed to tweak my approved sender list. That’s three applications (SA, SquirrelMail, and PuTTY) just to keep my inbox clean. Then the straw dropped.

The camel’s back was broken when Dreamhost upgraded their servers and split e-mail and hosting. Granted, my hosted apps are performing much better but I had to revamp my SpamAssassin installation. This is when I reached the inflection point of managing my own spam software: value began to trend downwards.

During a short weekend project, I updated the Dreamhost MX records, moved my e-mail, and updated my existing forwarding addresses. Google’s “Report spam” button has made life easier for now but I also wonder when in the future I’ll use SpamAssassin and where will that be?

This entry was posted by Matthew Crumley on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 12:23 AM. Matthew is currently a software developer who works on simulation devices and their user interfaces. In his spare time he reads the news, dabbles with code, is active in his homeowner association, and enjoys life with his wife and pet terrier. You can leave Matthew a comment or trackback from your own site. Follow comments to this entry via RSS. Explore other posts marked with these tags: email, Google, hosting, project, SpamAssassin.