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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)."
...how much of that was outgoing? i.e, how much did AOL users themselves generate? Probably more than they want to let on...
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
every other letter i write to my mom gets rejected. if i am not allowed to spam my mom, who else should be????
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
More importantly, how many valid emails were wrongly discarded as spam?
Members are clicking on the "Report Spam" button to send up to 5.5 million pieces of junk email per day to AOL's anti-spam engineers
Your guess is that every single piece of spam that gets through is reported?
This may not be the crowd that wants to hear this, but some radical changes need to be made in the email protocol to minimize the amount of spam that users deal with these days. Bottom line is that the goal should be for email communications to be as trustworthy as phone calls - sure, there are some telemarketers and crank callers out there, but if the noise level from your phone was as high as in your email, there would be marches on Washington to demand a solution.
I would think the most likely candidate would be to build-in verification of the sender, and bring about the end of anonymous email. That's sure to raise the hackles of many here, but so far, nothing's working.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Would someone mod the parent up +1 Funny, please? Because the poster can't be serious. Let's look at a few of the more obvious problems with the post:
Hope this clears up exactly which "rights" have been infringed here -- the rights of spammers to dump 1 billion pieces of mail into AOL users' mailboxes. And I just can't get too hot under the collar about their loss.
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It doesn't help the wasted bandwidth problem.
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Since the users don't know what mail they were going to get, there is much less accountability. OTOH, if my ISP blocked the (legitimate) mail I sent, then I can complain to them.
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The ISP can be forced to implement arbitrary filters like "pro-terrorist", "anti-US", etc by the government and no one would be the wiser.
So this is a first step, but not the Right Thing. I hope ISPs start coming under more pressure to filter their outgoing mail.Exactly. Tell me where it says in the USA Constitution that a corporation is required to pay to support your missguided interpretation of freedom of speech? The government isn't even required to do this.
The only thing the government can't do is supress or prevent you from doing so.
I should be allowed to stand on the steps of the White house and demand that I be given press conference time immediately following the President, just because I am a citizen. But I should be reqected my requests and even asked to shut up and read the Constitution that I tried erroneously to wave in my defense.
And how many spams originate from citizens of USA any way, more from outside I would venture.
robi
Don't exaggerate.
When you compare spam-blocking with Nazi atrocities, you're belittling the horror that Nazi victims experienced.
Many of those Communists, Jews, trade unionists, Catholics were often killed in all manner of horrific ways.
By contrast, AOL isn't killing anybody. If AOL blocks spam, somebody looses some money, and an AOL user gains some time, money & sanity.
There can be no fair comparison of these two activities.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I don't get a whole lot of spam daily, nothing to get terribly upset about. Bandwidth usage for the amount of spam I get on my private server would be relatively trivial.
But what kind of bandwidth would 1 billion spam messages take up? And system resources to process all that excess mail? I bet AOL spends a small fortune on spam - they gotta pay those "SPAM" engineers too.
I hear people complain about spam, but I generally think to myself "yeah yeah." But 1 billion freakin messages is nuts.
-kidlinux.
I happen to believe in the sanctity of the Freedom of Speech. I do not subscribe to your concept of corporate control of rights.
I don't know where this idea comes from that just because you are a business it means that you can do whatever you want, including infringing upon rights guaranteed by the government.
This is a sad double standard being applied to "unwanted" emails. The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them. They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers, they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards, and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums. But spammers don't have these rights?
You better think about that position a little.
I have been pwned because my
I'm not positive, but in my media law class I'm pretty sure we're taught that commercial speech is not afforded the same rights as, say, political speech. For example, Valentine v. Christenson (sp?) where the Supreme Court ruled an advertiser was not guarenteed the right to advertising on the street with flyers, even if he attached an editorial. I don't think spam is considered free speech in some or many cases.
I abhor censorship in any form.
So do I. However, what AOL did in blocking the spam, IE, controlling the use of their own property isn't censorship.
It would be censorship if AOL tried to preven the spammers from using any other company's facilities to steal their advertising placements.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You are saying AOL's spam filters have a 99.4% success rate (5.5m/1b)? Please. Why is this modded up?
However, what AOL did in blocking the spam, IE, controlling the use of their own property isn't censorship.
It's censorship from the standpoint that they are making a determination for their users as to which content is acceptable and which is not. "Controlling the use of their own property" would be a valid argument if they simply tightened their acceptible use policy in regards to their own users, and restricted access to their own mailservers by preventing open relay, checking for mangled headers, referencing blackhole lists, etc.
The point at which I think it goes too far is when AOL starts analyzing messages and deciding for their users whether or not a particular message is in fact, spam. I think what would be better is to give the users tools that would allow them to filter their own mail (ie, reject messages with specific keywords or combinations of keywords, like penis+enhancement or Nigerian+ambassador).
I would even be satisfied if AOL simply ranked email with a spam meter, and then flagged the message as "Possible Spam" or something. As long as the message itself is actually delivered to its intended recipient. The user can then decide for themselves if they choose to trust AOL's ranking system and simply auto-delete anything flagged, or if they want to inspect it themselves.
I can partly answer that, and say it's probably a huge number. Bigger than they want you to know. I help out with a local church's Web site. This is a church -- they're far too nice and technically inept to spam anyone. But their site is hosted on a machine that about 100 domains use. Other customers of the ISP HAVE sent spam. AOL blocks at IP address, so all 100 domains are blocked.
So. To answer your question, a LOT of legitimate email is not getting through. I had to work with the church's ISP and AOL spam cops to get them to make an exception for the church's domain. They LEFT the other 98 domains that hadn't spammed on the block list, just because those domains hadn't complained yet. And of course, every now and then, they "forget" that they've made an exception for us, and I have to go over it all again.
Really, AOL gets such big numbers because their system is not very efficient.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
> The user can then decide for themselves if they
> choose to trust AOL's ranking system and simply
> auto-delete anything flagged, or if they want to
> inspect it themselves.
The user can decide for himself whether or not to use AOL at all. By choosing to use AOL he chooses to accept AOL's filters. There's no censorship here.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What the hell are you talking about?
The main costs of spam are probably:
1) the increased bandwidth required to accept all that spam into AOL's network in addition to all the other Internet traffic coming in
2) the increased capacity of their mail servers to store and process all that spam in addition to the legitimate mail they have to process
3) the cost of employing an entire department of people whose job is to try to reduce the amount of spam going around
4) support costs from customers who complain about receiving spam that should have been blocked or about not receiving legitimate mail that was blocked by mistake
5) badwill (opposite of goodwill) due to the association of their company with spam (everybody knows - or thinks they know - AOL users receive more spam than users of many other ISPs)
Did I miss anything?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Counting multiple e-mail addresses skews the statistics bit. How many spams do you receive per day per e-mail address?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The user can decide for himself whether or not to use AOL at all.
Agreed.
By choosing to use AOL he chooses to accept AOL's filters.
Agreed.
There's no censorship here.
I disagree. AOL *is* censoring the information that reaches their members' inboxes by filtering that material based on AOL's criteria, and not necessarily the criteria of their individual members. As I said before, I would have no problem with AOL taking measures against spam if those measures were largely passive in nature (ie, flagging incoming messages that meet certain criteria as "Possible Spam" and giving each individual member choices as to how they want to handle those messages). My problem with AOL's approach is that they are preventing those messages that AOL considers spam from ever reaching their customers' inboxes.
Granted, one man's "censorship" is another man's "filtering service." I just think that AOL would be better served by giving their users the power to filter their own mail, rather than taking a "my way or the highway" approach to it. At the very least, the users should be given the option to choose whether they trust AOL's spam filter and want to just let their mail be deleted, or whether they want it routed to a designated "spam" folder of their inbox where they can verify it themselves.
How can AOL complain? The spammers are just
following AOL's lead!
Does anyone else find it fitting that AOL [those responsible for a flood of "XXX FREE HOURS" discs each week in my snail mail, magazines, and breakfast cereal] should suffocate under an avalanche of their own electronic hellspawn?
There is sweet justice after all!
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras