On Fri, 3 May 2002, Scott Granados wrote:
deal with spam is. Honestly sure I get it like everyone else, in some of my accounts more than others but I also get a real truckload in my snailmail box. Just as with all the pottery barn catalogs <no offense to pottery barn I guess>:) I have a delete key just like my trash can. I know at one time the argument was made, and quite correctly that people were paying to receive this service and these messages cost them money. Today with flat rate access and many people not paying on a per packet basis it seems to me that the responsibility lies with the end user to filter properly and or dress that delete key. I always shut down customers who spam and disrupt service simply because I don't want the backlash or want specific ips blocked but in a way I don't feel its right that the carriers do the filtering it seems tome up to the end user.
Let me put this into real world terms. I run a mail server (among other things) with about 4000 mailboxes, and about 40,000 messages a day. over 85% of all mail on average is marked as spam by spamassasin on this mail server. I, late last year, had to upgrade it to a multiprocessor box with gigabytes of memory, striped raid 0+1, etc. etc. etc. to handle the load. I could have used a mail server only 15% of the size of this one. Or better put, I could have used a 300mhz pentium III box with low-end IDE drives and a modest amount (256MB) of memory instead of the Dual PRocessor 6-SCSI 2GB ram thing we are running now. Add to that the 8-10 hours a week we spend cleaning up messes related to spammers who decide that sending 50,000+ messages as fast as they can to us is a good thing. For instance, on thursday of last week, we took almost 5000 messages in about a hour from one spammer in particular. The mail server *can't* handle this load so it basically was a Denial of Service attack. Right now there are 5000 messages in our mail queue which are spam bounces which aren't being accepted by the spammer's mail server. I could go on and on and on and on. I might be more inclined to tolerate the spammers if they weren't bad net citizens. They forge their email addressses so they can't receive bounces. They don't have any consideration about the load they are placing on the remote mail server (I've seen 40 streams open at once to my mail server from the same class C - all injecting mail as fast as possible). And on and on and on. - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Innovation Machine Ltd. P.O. Box 5749 http://www.imach.com/ Helena, MT 59604 Home of PacketFlux Technogies and BackupDNS.com (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your personal freedoms - visit http://www.lp.org/