Mine do as well, yes. I'm not knocking GMail's spam filters, but it's absolutely possible to run your own mail server virtually spam free. I've had the same primary e-mail address for 11 years, posted it all over the place, and I almost never see spam in my inbox.

The problem is that you will still receive the mail. If you run even a semi-popular website, your ___domain is going to be hit by all kinds of bogus mail. Since I'm a programmer not a server administrator, the CPU and IO was constantly overloaded because of spam. Whenever I switched to Google Apps, the hard drive breathed a sign of relief.

I'm sure if you take the time to properly administrate, you can run email on your own server. In my case it was too confusing, took too much effort, and I wanted to get back to doing real work.

Oh, I agree with you 100%. For 99% of the people out there, it makes far more sense to have someone else handle all that for you. You just have to accept there may be downtime that beyond your control.

I was merely answering lsb's question and pointing out that GMail's spam filtering isn't magic or unique. It's merely very good. A skilled mail server admin can replicate the same level of spam filtering. I'm not recommending that everyone run their own mail server.