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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.
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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 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 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.
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