---
title: "MailMum Project Started"
description: "MailMum project officially started on 2020-01-03. It was born out of an internal project."
url: "https://mailmum.io/posts/project-page-started/"
---

# MailMum Project Started

A name, domain, logo, and a draft website - this is the way
[MailMum](https://mailmum.io) was born out of an internal project.

## From a necessity to this service

MailMum was born out of a need to face problems with unwanted emails called
[spam](https://mailmum.io/glossary/spam/) or junk. As filters like [Spamassassin](https://spamassassin.apache.org) were
good, but spammers are human, their job is to figure out how to bypass them.
They will try and will find ways to reach your inbox.

But even before we were using filters, [blacklists](https://mailmum.io/glossary/ip-blacklisting/)
were the most common defense against unwanted emails. Like most starting email
admins, we used public [DNS blocklists](https://mailmum.io/glossary/dns-blocklist-dnsbl/) first and were very happy, that a lot of junk arriving these days as
waves from single senders could be blocked, reducing the amount of junk and
traffic to our servers.

But as soon as blacklists started to list IPs essential for our customers and
us, we faced the problems as we think every admin met, who used or still using
public blacklists.

But as the internet started to grow and more and more servers and services with
virtual machines and later called cloud computing, grew even faster, more and
more blacklists began to miss a lot of spam hitting our systems. That's why
we've started and tried to understand and build our first blacklisting and
whitelisting solution, to deliver better quality for our customers.

By [whitelisting](https://mailmum.io/glossary/ip-whitelisting/) essential services, we could
bypass blacklisting for our customers' important IPs and email services on
public blacklists.

Building our blacklists based on gathered information through hitting junk our
inboxes, spam traps, and analyzing logs, we started to develop our blacklists
based directly on servers. With about 50 entries, we got better then the public
blacklists were using and could stop most junk. These blacklists became a big
success because we blocked most of the same unwanted emails for our users, which
they have seen hundreds or thousands of times. For receivers, they were all the
same. If you are an email admin, you know what we are talking about.

But as our built list grew, we need to find a solution to check, update, and
extend the entries with less manual work. With time the records got stale, or IP
ranges were used for valid traffic; we need to figure out how to manage better
and see what we can do to improve this.

This success and need for more information was the point we started to build a
service, where we could see, update and improve our blacklists, which were at
this point, our best line of defense against mass junk and unwanted emails -
especially the recurring ones.

## MailMum was born

To reduce the time to manage the blacklists through DevOps tools directly on
servers and restart the email services after every change, we built our
blacklists, which could diversify servers and this way and was fast enough to
answer to handle all the requests without getting high system load and slowdown
mail processing. At this point, every admin had his instance he could manage by
using his favorite scripting language.

...