[extropy-chat] My, they *are* persistent...

Brent Neal brentn at freeshell.org
Mon Jun 28 01:19:11 UTC 2004


 (6/26/04 19:14) Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:

>It looks like a new-ish SPAM strategy is to send clusters of
>monster 1-Mb files to choke the procmail scripts. Score one
>for the spammers, I guess. It killed the procmail program
>and overloaded the CPU on the machines of my ISP. I honestly
>don't know what rate I was receiving spam- my logs show something
>like three or four thousand per day with most of that going into
>/dev/null. My ISP and I are trying some different things now
>for my domain which presently cuts that number down significantly.
>
>Does anyone know what percentage of the Internet mail is
>spam now? I am curious. I wouldn't be surprised if it was > 80%.
>
>Amara


Amara,

I have not seen any aggregate figures for the internet as a whole, and if I did, I wouldn't trust them for the simple reason that if we could reliably tell what is spam and what is not, we could selectively filter one or the other. ;) Therefore, I suspect that any "aggregrate" spam percentages are largely guesses made up in order to fill some political or financial purpose. (Buy my anti-spam software! Etc.)

However, my lovely spam filtration program of choice tells me that since January 1st of this year, in the seven email accounts that I use regularly, 26% of the messages I received are spam.  This is a biased sample, since I have no accounts that are guaranteed to be sold to spammers (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.)  At least two of these addresses are printed unmunged on publically accessible websites and are subject to harvester bots.

Brent

-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
http://brentn.freeshell.org

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein



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