Slashdot Mirror
Ask ISP Owner Barry Shein About the Spam Wars
Spam sucks. But it's worse for ISPs than for the rest of us, because they get bounces and complaints and other behind-the-scenes spam-caused messes the rest of us don't see. AOL talks of spam as "public enemy number one." Barry Shein, who started (and still runs) the world's first full-service dialup ISP, likens spammers to organized criminals, and calls spam "an organized, vicious, sociopathic thing" in this article, which spurred an interesting Slashdot discussion. So what should we do about spam? Ask Barry. One question per post, please. We'll post his answers to 10 of the highest-moderated questions sometime in the next week or so.
If I was the president of the company that makes Viagra I'd be nervous.
Ah, here is the reference. Diplomat shot dead in Prague
Your figures are totally incorrect. You obviously don't run your own mail server (or if you do, spammers have never found you).
For a start, ISP's get hit every day with repeated dictionary attacks where a spammer tries thousands of common usernames for each domain the ISP hosts. The sending hosts (usually a number of raped proxies) pipelines the SMTP sessions and doesn't wait for a response. Every single one of those emails chews up CPU, memory and disk space. It's a non-stop attack on your mail server queues.
When they get a miss, sendmail bounces the email to the postmaster and tries to deliver a bounce message to the forged FROM address, so your queues and disk fill up for days with this crap.
When they get a hit, it's even more disk space chewed up until the user downloads them. Some spammers are embedding HTML and graphics in their spam as well, so they are getting larger and larger.
I don't know where you saw 2-5% spam content. Most ISP's are seeing ten times that, unless they employ agressive filters which may be ideal for people who run their own domains but can be problematic for ISP's.