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The New Yorker On Spam

Posted by kdawson on from the they-don't-like-it-one-bit dept.

aqk notes an article in the Aug. 6th New Yorker surveying the spam problem up-to-date. The New Yorker may not be exactly the MSM, but it is pretty influential. The author got only one fact wrong that I noticed: Canter and Siegel's seminal spam was propagated through Usenet and not email. Still, it's a good look at the history of spam and the scale of the problem today. The amount of spam that "spam king" Robert Alan Soloway, indicted under the CAN-SPAM Act, is accused of sending over a period of four years is now pumped out about every 30 seconds, around the clock, around the world.

1 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. How much does spam cost? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No kidding. I admin a medium sized ISP. We have 8 (soon to be 9) distributed servers dedicated to email.

    3 load balanced e-mail filtering appliances, at the Internet facing edge. (Basically, BSD boxes running postfix, spamassasin, clamav, policyd, DCC checks, RBL and a few other checkers and daemons I'm forgetting.) They get about 90% of our spam.

    2 load balanced postfix boxes, running policyd on our outgoing mail, they will greylist any naughty customers with a zombie that have sent to much. Also, they do inbound user verification with LDAP, if spam has BCCed an invalid recipient or two, reject. Add another layer of anti-virus on the way to the customers. This catches another 8-9%. I'm guessing around 1% gets through.

    1 DCC server, because we exceeded the threshold for being able to use free DCC long ago. (I'll admit it's a bit under used.)

    1 MTA running exim for the hosted domains. This has spamassain, and a few other services, supplementary to everything in front of it. I'd say it gets most of the rest for those with hosted domains.

    1 big bad 8x processor pop server that runs webmail and pop for the customers. It does no spam checking, because it could never handle the load, just stores what we think is not spam for the customers, around 25,000 accounts.

    By comparison, we need one (1) production, not counting backups, provisioning server. It handles minor things like DHCP for 15,000 customers.

    Now you have an idea on what your ISP spends its money and resources on. There is no small industry selling you solutions to fight the SPAM.