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Our mail load is here. That is a minute's worth of traffic.

Care to show benchmarks?

The usenet reference was wrt downloading messages from a server (pull instead of push).

This is what we see at work: Graph

You proposal would require that we accept all those messages (or equivalent envelope) and keep a lookout for mail getting deleted by others. DJBs proposal for Internet mail 2000 works very well with qmail, which always sends one message per recipient.

Dealing with spam takes a little more effort in handling complexity.

Postfix, across a few boxes:

http://nixcartel.org/~devdas/minute.png

I'll let you do the maths.

Being worked on

Hell, clickable link:
http://nixcartel.org/~devdas/minute.png

And if /. allows an inline img:

This is what $WORK rejects. Those numbers are culled from a random minute of log analysis, and are accurate.

Half of what spam slips through is caught by some more complex filters.
And about 20% of what gets through is still spam.

Do you really think that spam still isn't a problem? Or that *any* content filter will scale to that kind of load, on a reasonable budget?

The right point of stopping spam is before it hits your MX, not after it has been accepted.

Google Archive in HTML
Powerpoint format
Steve Atkins presentation to the ASRG: Google cache as HTML

Same as powerpoint

A graph of a random minute at a large email provider.
Each point is one host.

Those numbers are all very very real.

Just for a sample of what we do at work, click here.

Its a personal page, not $ork, but the stats are real numbers.

Only about 10% of those are due to viruses hitting us. Most viruses hitting us go into a local BL that keeps all mail from them away. Works fine for us.

As for spammers deleting your email address, since when did spammers become that attentive?

About saving bandwidth for the user who uses POP3/IMAP to retrieve mail, discarding known viruses is a much better solution.

If a regular SMTP server ever realys a virus (we do get a few of those), then killing the connection in the middle is just asking to be sent the same crap repeatedly, because the break shows up as a bad connection.