AOL Cans 1 billion Spams In One Day

linuxwrangler writes "AOL announced today that its spam filters hit the 1 billion reject mark for a 24 hour period. This is an average of 28 rejects per day per member. In addition, AOL spam engineers say they receive 5.5 million spam submissions each day from AOL users. Other reports here(1) and here(2)."

Comments

Re:Wow!

[StarOwl]

Man, what I'd give to only have 28 pieces of spam thrown my way each day. Here's how many pieces of putrid canned ham have been spewed my way in the past few days:


23 February: 1095 spams, 7,821,318 bytes
24 February: 1320 spams, 6,581,776 bytes
25 February: 1700 spams, 6,875,706 bytes
26 February: 1598 spams, 7,910,568 bytes
27 February: 2659 spams, 13,183,247 bytes
28 February: 1436 spams, 6,280,790 bytes
1 March: 1492 spams, 6,917,835 bytes
2 March: 1274 spams, 5,805,475 bytes
3 March: 1488 spams, 6,196,761 bytes
4 March: 1626 spams, 9,023,298 bytes

Thank Ghu for tools like procmail, tmda, and spamoracle.

Re:wow that's expensive or is it cheap.

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, this is some voodoo math if I've ever seen some...
your assumptions are pretty poor, for example:

how can you possibly assume that the cost of a spam is only in 1) the bandwidth required to receive the spam and 2) the amount of processor time spent to score and delete the messages?

The most costly aspect of spam for AOL is the damage to its image, and the consequent loss of its user base. That in turn, has a consequent loss in stock price.

also, i like how you relate the "despamination" costs of the salaries of the engineers with the costs of spam to the ISP.

here's your logic:
"it would of course not make sense to spend more on de spamination than the harm it costs"

well, this is true, but what can you logically conclude from this? only that the harm it costs is AT LEAST as much as the cost of "de spamination"

this DOES NOT mean that:
(harm done by spam) == (cost of de spamination)
as you imply in your post.
in fact, quite the opposite, if I were company, would I embark on an endeavor if I only expected to breakeven? HELL NO. a company would only try to do something like despamification or new features in a piece of software if it expected to come out ahead. This means that:
(harm done by spam) >> (cost of engineers to de spaminate)

also, I think you severely lowballed the cost of the engineers doing the despamification. a third of a million gets you ~5-6 engineers? If they are sucessfully filtering 1 billion spam a day, they need more than that just for the IT personnel keeping the processing power running.

Also, you are confusing the costs to the ISP. don't forget that AOL will still incur the costs of deleting the spam, the costs of the bandwidth to receive the spam, and ON TOP OF THAT the costs of the engineers.

so instead of:
(harm done by spam) == (cost of engineers to despam)
it is much more accurately depicted by the following:
(harm done by spam) >> (cost of engineers to despam) + (cost of bandwidth to receive spam) + (cost of processing power to score and delete spam)

An efficient anti-spam weapon

[SysKoll]

So your old email accounts are spammed to death, huh?

If you want to get rid of spam, do this:

1. Create a "secret" email account from a reputable provider. Make it unguessable. Add some digits or weird long strings. Don't give it to anyone.

2.Go to spamgourmet.com and create an account. It's free and open source. In the "forward emails to" field, enter your secret email.

3. Give spamgourmet addresses to your friends. If your account name is Joe6Pack, give your pal Jack Daniels an address Jack.Daniels.Joe6Pack at spamgourmet dot com. To greatdeal.com, give greatdeal.com.Joe6Pack at spamgourmet dot com. This way you know who has what address. Those spamgourmet addresses are disposable.

All the emails sent to your various spamgourmet addresses are forwarded to your secret account.

4. If Jack, who is a friggin' idiot running XP and Outlook, gets yet another Kletz-like virus, the content of his Outlook address book will be compromized and all these addresses harvested by spammers. Just go to spamgourmet.com and disable the compromized address. Tell Jack he's a fool. Give him another disposable address if needed... Until next time.

If greatdeal.com turns out to be a spammer, just disable their address.

5. After a couple of months, disable your old email accounts, the ones that are spammed to death right now.

6. No more spam. Or if you get spam, just disable the spammed address and report the spammer to spamhaus.org. You'll never be spammed more than once.

Works for me.

-- SysKoll