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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)."
28 per subcriber per day caught.
Only leaves 103 apeice...
TODO: Something witty here...
And how many got through?
Well, maybe they are, but that's not what's reported in the article.
AOL users are reporting 5.5 million spam messages a day to customer service.
In the AOL "Mail Center" there is an option to "Allow ALL mail". I take it this doesn't work, or that AOL should change it to "Allow all mail that we decide to let through..." ?
If this is true, can you imagine how much bandwidth and disk space is wasted by spam. I'd be willing to bet that the money lost to spam exceeds the money lost to pirate software and mp3's combined.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Ah, frea speach. What an overrated 'right' that is. Sorry, but your precious Amendment only prevents the government from shutting you up. There's no reason AOL can't censor you, and there's nothing to stop the Slashdot mods putting you to -1. That was settled long ago; Sanford Wallace, the Ralsky of his day, sued AOL and Compuserve for filtering his junk out, and he lost.
It costs AOL $2 per month per user just to handle the spam traffic. AOL's huge userbase makes them a magnet for dictionary attacks. If you want an unfiltered mail feed, then by all means pay someone extra for spam storage, or run your own mail server.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
No, we have not. Spam is the #1 complaint we get from our users. They don't want the stuff, so we're fighting it. We block what they ask us to block.
But, of course, we're AOL and this is Slashdot, so naturally everything we do is wrong.
-BK
Chemical Blog
I'm kind of torn on this issue. On the one hand, I hate spam and those who allow it to proliferate. On the other hand, I abhor censorship in any form. I wouldn't have an issue with this at all if AOL simply provided its users with the *tools* to eliminate their own spam if they choose to do so. My problem with this is that AOL itself is deciding to filter its members' email, and making the determination itself as to what is and is not "spam". That's a reckless step down a slippery slope, in my opinion.
I would guess that deleting spam is about as expensive as transmitting it for an ISP. that is the processor intensive task of scoring and removing a spam probably is a wash with the processor light task of tranmitting and storing it. Now for the sake of argument lets just guess a wild number for the cost of filtering or passing along a spam. lets say 0.001 dollars.
if that were true then a billion spam deleted would cost AOL 1million dollars per day (plus the ones that got through). that would be a third of a billion dollars a year. THat seems way to high. So it must be less. SO maybe its 0.000001 cents?? that would come to a third of a million dollars a year.
My guess is that the latter is probably a good guess. why? well how many engineers has AOL assigned to the de spamination? perhaps a third of a million dollars worth every year? it would of course not make sense to spend more on de spamination than the harm it costs.
so anyhow assuming this wild guessing is within an order of magnitude then the proper charge to fine a spammer would be some multiple of 0.000001 dollars per spam sent. which is not an awful lot.
so is spam really that costly to ISPs??? Maybe not
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Apparently AOL users can set up their accounts to reject ALL email originating outside AOL (as if the rest of the internet were worse SPAMmers than AOL folks). Amazingly, this setting is turned on on some accounts (many, I suspect) without them even knowing it. I run a webserver for a few businesses, and we get LOTS of mail bounced back from AOL account for this reason. It's a real pain when, for example, an AOL customer is trying to sign up on our site, and their account activation key gets bounced back to us because of this stupid setting. I bet they're counting all these messages in their total.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I remember some survey from years ago that asked "if you could press a button and someone on the other side of the World would die, but you'd recieve 1,000,000 dollars, would you do it?". I'm now wondering, if you could press a button, and a spammer, somewhere would die - would YOU do it? Scary as it seems to me, I'd probably say "yes"...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Having all email routed to my inbox means that my figures above include dictionary attacks.
Using tagged addresses also runs up the total a lot. Every time I give out my email address, either on a registration form or in a public posting, I use a different tag.
I started tagging addresses in the early days of spam. Remember when we foolishly thought we could attach a disclaimer to usenet posts along the lines of "send me spam, and I'll bill you $50 under the anti-fax laws"? Well, I was dumb. I figured that in order to "prove" that unsolicited email was unsolicited, I had to have some proof of how the spammer got my email address, and that I had a clear disclaimer.
The good news: I have a pretty good idea of which of my online activities generate spam (e.g., posts to control.cancel and *.test, my NIC registrations, and usenet group-creation votes all seem to be popular for the spam-database trollers)
The bad news: I can easily get hit 30, 40, or 50 times for any one mass-spewing a spammer decides to do.
The totals above contain NO false positives -- they're all tied to tagged addresses which only produce spam. Not included are the 50 or so false negatives I get a day, which get tackled through other means.
Do you really have no idea how much of a nightmare it would be to try to implement a whitelist of everyone who wants to send legitimate mail to an aol.com address? How big a holding queue do you suppose you'd need? Do you know how much legitimate mail is sent by automated systems? I can't imagine the tech support calls this would generate.
Besides, if you tried to implement a whitelist for all of AOL, the spammers would get around it pretty quickly - just sign up for a free trial, send yourself spam, add the spam to the whitelist, and away you go. It would have to be per-user to be meaningful, and if they implemented it, it would just mean most AOL users would start using Hotmail or Yahoo instead, as I'm sure many do already.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Straying a bit offtopic, but I suffer way more from being sent email viruses than I ever have from spam. I might see 1 spam (maybe 1k - 20k bytes) every couple of days, whereas I get anything from 20 to 100 copies of Klez or Yaha, at 45k - 188k bytes each per day.
AFAICT, all those came from the fact that I made the mistake of listing my real email address when I uploaded a Winamp skin. It was up for less than a week in December, and I'm still getting viruses now. The hotmail one I put up to replace it (only ever used for that Winamp skin) gets a similar level.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
Spam became a huge problem here roughly a year ago, and it started taking up too much employee time. So roughly six months ago, we started using Spam Assassin. In that six months, Spam assassin has caught roughly 90% of the spam we get, totalling well over 500,000 spam mails.
Am I crazy, or is 1/2 million spams for only 7 people in less than six months absolutely insane or what? How can anyone argue that these spammers are running legitamite businesses?
I think it's high-time for some legis-fuckin-lation to curb this insanity :)
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden