I run a web/email server out of my home off my DSL line. (not as slow as you'd guess, and power at my home has been amazingly reliable the last few years.) I'm in the process of upgrading my old server to a brand new machine. I tend to build servers from cheap parts on sale at Fry's and upgrade only the power supplies from whatever came in the cheap case. The old server is a Pentium 4 2.66GHZ, running FreeBSD 5.4. I built it three years ago and since October 2005 it's been running almost 24/7 (went almost two years without even a reboot - I shut it down once to replace fans and the hard drive, as maintenance).

The new server is a Core 2 Duo E4500, 2.2GHZ, another Fry's special (CPU + motherboard: $119; 2GB of RAM was about $30). With dual core, this thing should be as much as 3X faster than the old CPU. (Plus, Core 2 Duo actually runs cooler than the older Pentium chips it replaced - nice in the summer time!) I installed FreeBSD 6.3 on it some months ago and have gradually been preparing it for full time service to replace the old server. I've been re-doing things I didn't do right the first time (but are hard to change once you put the server into full-time service). I upgraded to a much newer Apache version. And, significantly, I switched to Postfix for my mail server.

Postfix has a neat add-on called Postgrey. It's an anti-spam mechanism that does this: every piece of email received is bounced back the first time to the sender saying "I'm busy now, try again later." Postgrey "greylists" the messages. A benign sending server will just try again until the email goes through. After the same server sends email a few times it is automatically "white listed" so it no longer gets delayed. But spam servers tend not to be smart enough to receive the the fake bounce. Essentially, most spam is just dropped off the face of the earth!

I use Gmail for my email (my server just forwards most of it on) and Gmail's spam filter is pretty good. But it still is a bit of a pain processing spam and sometimes, real messages get filtered as spam. I've been getting hundreds of spam a day for a while - mostly in my spam folder automatically, but still annoying.

Since I installed postgrey and tuned it, I'm getting almost ZERO spam! Like 2-3 spam a day, TOPS. This is freakin' amazing. I keep re-sending myself test messages to make sure something's not broken, but it's all working fine. Ah, the geek in me...

Now I've just got to deploy the new server for web traffic, which will probably happen tonight. I think I have most of the kinks out of it. I've just got to deploy a good backup solution (not doing RAID for reasons I will not go into) since hard drives can and do fail. Once that's done, I'll be able to turn off the old server for good.

(And now, back to your friendly political debate.)

Andrew

I pass my domain thru Postini. (Postini was recently bought out by Google) Google now has a email filtering service that is powered by Postini. Have not tried the Google service but Postini works great for just 2.50 a mailbox/address.