Slashdot Mirror
You've Got Spam: AOL Blocks 1/2 Trillion Spam
yohaas writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that AOL blocked more than 500 billion spam messages for its users in 2003. That comes to 40 messages a day per user. The company regularly blocks 75-80% of all incoming mail as spam! The article also lists the top 10 spam phrases for the year, including such come-ons as: 'Viagra online', 'Online pharmacy', 'Get out of debt' and 'Get bigger'."
Instead of sending the mails to the bitbucket AOL should do something about the abuse. They've got the IP addresses of half a trillian zombies and open proxies. Where's the AOL goon squad? They should be kicking down doors, not writing press releases.
AOL blocks a lot of legitimate email as well, however. If you prefer to run your own email server (for example, about half of all the Linux broadband users on Slashdot) then you cannot send to an AOL user... same goes for SWBell users too I think. Sure they block a lot of email and I can kinda understand their purpose in blocking "dynamic" or "residential" IPs... but that is collateral damage.
=9,765.6 petabytes [I guessed at the average size of a spam email]
I wonder how much that costs AOL?
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
I've done a lot of email work with companies.
It's damaging email. It's hurting business. It costs BILLIONS a year to slow down spam to make mailboxes not entirely useless.
A manager: "I can't see how someone serious about doing business could keep relying on email."
Mail is being discarded (no bounce backs, no trail) all over the place.
Now, when the US House stops blocking spam to their own mailboxes, maybe we'll get some laws with some balls and maybe the FTC, FBI and similar agencies might get the budget and motivation to track down the HUGE amount of spam that is illegal in that it's perpetrating scams or illegal medicines.
We convict the minor players and offer them real prison or they get to appear on the new Fox show:
"Cane the Spammer".
20 whacks. Each whack given by a system admin selected by lottery.
Do it public and demotivate the kiddies willing to blast out some mail for some guy for $500.
You are quiet correct, as a sysadmin, I know full well just how much money spam costs, and a big chunck of it is not paid for by the spammer. Its paid for by the network that has to pay for the bandwidth that is used to deliver the crap the spammer sends to me, intended for my customers that don't even want the f'ing shit. I have to pay so a spammer can choke my mail server full of crap that will just get deleted. I have to pay for the spammers that employ dictionary attacks to get spam through to any user they can find. Its my bandwidth that suffers so that they can bombard just a few dozen more people with their nonsense ads that no one wants to see. I didn't ask for it, nor did my customers, why the fuck should I have to pay for it then?
And if that is not enough, I can assure you, a great deal of spam is comming in from windows systems that have been infected with some exploit and turned into mail relays. Real Time Blacklists have been a lot less effective over the past few weeks due to spam comming from dsl and cable lines now with a new vigor. Its not just a couple comming from an owned pc, its a couple hundred.
And yet, its still fucking legal! Explain it to me God, explain it to me, I want it explained, Jesus!!!!!!
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.