Botnet Responsible for 18% of World’s Spam Knocked Offline (mashable.com) |
Botnet Responsible for 18% of World’s Spam Knocked Offline (mashable.com) |
If you can't get ScumBagISP-A to clean up their act, go to ScumBagISP-Upstream-B, and then the next hop ScumBagISP-Upstream-Nexthop-C, and the next, until you find a responsible carrier who can de-peer?
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/11/russian_b...
As far as I know it only worked temporarily.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/11/russian_b...
Some random googling specifies a number around 175 billion for number of spams sent per day.
That works out to an average of 12,223 terabytes per day - of just spam. Now multiply that by the number of hops that each message take. Assuming each message only has to touch one intermediary server between source and destination, that's still 3.6 petabytes.
[1] http://email.about.com/od/emailstatistics/f/What_is_the_Aver...
The tools are out there, maybe the ISP's could give the users a configuration screen enabling them to block spam upstream. User virtual firewalls could be useful to the user and also the ISP. Maybe users could be tested on what they know and from that certain default settings are made on the firewall and options locked. If a user don't know what there doing then lets help them. Then any block will point them to speak to a human on the phone as they need that level of help. But instead we allow anybody to have a loaded electronic gun drive around the whole of the internet, scary when you think of it like that, but thats what you have, oh and spam.
I used to find this annoying when running a private mail server, but then I realized that relaying through the ISP outgoing SMTP proxies probably ended up with net benefit in delivery rates anyways, due to IP reputation.
Also, Email does not need to hop from mail server to mail server all that much due to DNS. Granted legitimate mail might move around a fair bit, but as far as the public internet is concerned the vast majority of spam is sender -> possibly senders mail server -> spam detection software -> /dev/null.
Most of the email my mail servers handle right now is legitimate.
However, since you asked so politely: I don't have extra hardware (I think e.g. Barracuda is crap), and I wouldn't say I have an entire software stack -- just that sqlgrey & spamassassin are components of the mail server software stack that I use.
I think that whether spam is a big deal or not depends a lot on the tools you use. I put a lot of time and effort initially into building a software stack that could handle spam (and other problems) more-or-less on its own, and now spend pretty close to no time at all having to personally deal with problems related to spam. Conversely, the ISP I used to work for went with a Barracuda appliance and had a pretty poor mail server configuration that they didn't want to overhaul, and AFAIK they still have to spend significant amounts of support time dealing with spam-related complaints.
It could be argued that since I had to spend a lot of time and effort on the initial setup, spam is a big deal. I don't think I'd disagree with that. But, it doesn't have to be a big deal every day.