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.

Comments

Re:If I ran an ISP...

[jd142]

I would just have a blanket, three strikes you are out policy. If someone complains about the content of your email three times, no matter the circumstances, you are outta there.

So if your best friend is infected with klez (or the latest variant) and sending messages that appear to be from you, if three people call to complain that you are sending them junk, you are outta there? Those are three complaints about the content of your email, and your policy says no matter the circumstances.

What if I don't like your political views that you've espoused on a political discussions mailing list and I call up your isp and tell them that your opinions about certain PICKWHATEVERPARTYYOUHATE Senators constitute a terrorist threat. After 3 of those complaints, you get dropped.

I wouldn't use an isp that didn't have some intelligence behind its decisions or didn't have an appeals process if I feel I was mistreated.

Re:Bayesian Filtering

[jaoswald]

You completely miss the point of Shein's tirade.

By the time it gets to your inbox, it has already cost your ISP money (time/effort/bandwidth) to deliver it. You just see what leaks through your ISP's filters, despite their best efforts.

Re:What would be the minimum actual cost?

[Zathrus]

I don't know where you saw 2-5% spam content

The 2-5% he guesstimated was total usage of bandwidth by SMTP. I say guesstimate because I've searched for bandwidth usages by protocol and haven't been able to find (recent) data. Unless we can have reasonably accurate numbers from backbone segments it's going to be difficult to estimate just how much Spam really does cost.

I mean, if the OP is correct and SMTP only chews up 2-5% of the backbone, then it's not nearly as big of a problem as if it's chewing up 20% or more.

Even so, if SMTP only takes up 5% of the bandwidth and 80% of that usage is Spam, consider just how much cost savings could be realized from dropping SMTP from 5% to 1%.

has destroyed the usefulness of email though

[Trepidity]

I'd argue this collateral damage has destroyed the usefulness of email even more than spam has. It's simply an unreliable medium these days -- you never know if your mail got there or not, because it could have been silently dropped with no bounce message sent. Thus whenever I send reasonably-important emails now, I use either the phone or AIM to confirm it was received.

Re:has destroyed the usefulness of email though

[TKinias]

scripsit Trepidity:

I'd argue this collateral damage has destroyed the usefulness of email even more than spam has. It's simply an unreliable medium these days -- you never know if your mail got there or not, because it could have been silently dropped with no bounce message sent.

There's another, more insidious effect. I have caught myself almost deleting important, legitimate e-mails because subject lines looked ``spammy'' on first glance. Something like 80% of the e-mail in my inbox is spam, so I delete more than I read. Eventually, something important is going to get deleted instead of read; heck, it may have happened already and I just don't know it yet.

Consequently, I never assume e-mail to be totally reliable.

I ask for mod-love for the first time ever here.

[stomv]

Regarding the Baysean Filtering question...

By the time (spam) gets to your inbox, it has already cost your ISP money (time/effort/bandwidth) to deliver it. You just see what leaks through your ISP's filters, despite their best efforts.

While in the short term I concur, in the long term I must cry au contraire.

If Baysean filtering makes its way to the general public -- or is introduced at an ISP level, then it will reduce the amount of spam that gets through to potential customers, and hence make each spamming less profitable.

The least profitable of the spam messages will dissapear, thereby reducing the loads on our mailboxes and on the ISP as a whole. Therefore, perhaps a better question is:

Is there a way to use Baysean Filtering to reduce the costs an ISP faces due to spam?