Does anyone use a separate mail box or anything for mailing lists?
Check your terminology. "mail box" normally means something like "a
separate message store" and implies that a different user will be used
to collect the contents. Sometimes this means a different
"left-hand-side" (LHS) for the email address, but not always.
How will users be identifying themselves to your mail system? The
general method these days, for environments with multiple users and
multiple domains, is for usernames to be "***@domain.tld". This
usually makes it difficult for you to have separate mailboxes for the
same username, as there is often an implied link between the username
and the file path of the mailbox (in this case
/var/mail/domain.tld/LHS/).
Given the ability for sieve and procmail to deliver to different
_folders_ within the same mailbox (especially easy if you are using
Maildir as you should be) then you should be able to filter mail
messages into different folders easily. However tools like sup and
notmuch follow the Opera M2/Gmail format, and tag messages instead of
giving them different path names -- this allows multiple tags per
message, instead of just one. So in those cases you use sieve or
procmail to add headers indicating the message tags, and just lump
them all into the same maildir location.
I can use sieve to move mail into folders, but I would like to keep spam
out of my new mailbox as long as possible.
That's easier than you think, especially if you are happy with a small
false positive rate. Reject everyone appearing on decent DNSRBLs (e.g.
b.barracudacentral.org : cbl.abuseat.org : dnsbl.njabl.org :
bl.spamcop.net) with a polite message and link back to the RBL in
question. You might need to add a whitelist to cope with clueless
companies. Spamassassin everything else, even the default ruleset will
do, and reject anything scoring too high.
I realise a mail alias would be a
problem on lists that restrict sender lists.
If you follow the received wisdom of a few years ago, you'll be using
throwaway addresses to subscribe to various lists. Sadly this makes it
difficult to unsubscribe from services that don't let you rewrite your
outgoing email, like gmail. But if you do, it can help when you want
to 'close' an address without affecting anything else. Also handy to
identify which list may have been leaked to the spammers, but possibly
too much hassle.
Any experience anyone cares to share? :)
You haven't mentioned software yet. Exim (with single config file, not
the Debian mess) + Dovecot gives you the most readable configuration
file, in my opinion. Not necessarily the most performant, but that
shouldn't be an issue for you.
Another option would be to set up a server shared with other people
who are interested in having their own email handled properly, and
whom you can trust to not steal your email. That way there are a
number of people on hand to fix problems, rather than just you. It
helps over the long term (5 years +).
-jim
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