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AOL Cans 1 billion Spams In One Day

Posted by timothy on from the high-water-mark-for-low-water-marks dept.

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)."

6 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Wow! by Tyler+Eaves · · Score: 5, Interesting

    28 per subcriber per day caught.

    Only leaves 103 apeice...

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    TODO: Something witty here...
  2. Failure rate? by waytoomuchcoffee · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And how many got through?

  3. Save those bits! by smartin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
  4. Re:This is the most important story of the year by bkocik · · Score: 5, Interesting
    AOL has taken it upon themselves to decide for their users what is appropriate speech and what is not

    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.

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    -BK
    Chemical Blog
  5. Some are configured to reject ALL outside email by Kakurenbo+Shogun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Re:How? by StarOwl · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My spam counts tend to get run up because of how my eight-year-old domain is set up (all incoming mail, regardless of the to address gets directed to the same inbox) and because I've made use of tagged addresses.

    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.