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By Latest Count, 95% of Email Is Spam
An anonymous reader writes "The European Network and Information Security Agency released its new spam report, which looks at spam budgets, the impact of spam and spam management. Less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the main bulk of mails, 95%, is spam. This is a very minor change, from 6%, in earlier ENISA reports. Over 25% of respondents had spam accounting for more than 10% of help desk calls. The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries."
I don't doubt that it's around 95%, but the logic of the above-quoted statement is certainly flawed.
Caveat Utilitor
I also get about 10 times as much spam as actual email. Fortunately, Google is pretty good at filtering that - the number of false negatives in my inbox has been less than ten this month, while I got over a thousand to my spam folder.
It's hard to comprehend how people deal without that level of spam filtering - I have relatives who regularly register new accounts in order to escape their spam.
Now I am not a corporate email guru, but why would spam be the reason to call for help? In this day and age it boggles the mind. Even my grandmother can deal with spam without needing tech support.
I was seeing more like 97% (once you excluded system generated internal emails - CVS and Bugzilla between them can generate a fair bit of mail).
The killer for running our own mail system in its entirety was when I did the arithmetic and our co-hosted secondary mail server was costing more than buying Google for Domains. That's before you even consider the document management Google for domains offers, which was just icing on the cake.
Micropayments. Yes I know it's been mentioned before, but one rarely hears of paying *each other* (rather than the host or government). It would be a good idea anyway even if spam didn't exist.
If we paid each other (say a penny or 1/10th of a penny), obviously the spam problem would be solved. (though some can charge nothing if they want) It also means that someone who gets a ton of email and hasn't got the time to read all of them will receive only the 'cream' of email. Only those who are willing to sacrifice say, a pound (or £10/£100 for super busy/famous people) would be able to email them.
As we know, Youtube has/is developing methods of payment to watch videos, and online papers are experimenting, so micropayments may be common sooner than we think.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
One thing to keep in mind is that even though it looks bad (and for email it certainly is..), most other mediums aren't quite as affected by it. I do get quite a bit of Spam on ICQ these days, but the ratio between spam messages and real messages is waaaaaaaay better than 20:1. I would expect the same to hold true for most other mediums as well, so that it might in fact be a good idea to use those as a separate alternative communication channel should your inbox become overwhelmed. Something i have noticed over the years is the reduction in Trojans and worms being sent (at least to my inbox). There was a time when i received around 50 trojan-emails a day, whereas now it has been quite a while that a spam mail did actually contain any attachment whatsoever. To summarize, yeah.. email looks bad, but there's a whole set of alternative or additional channels that can be used which aren't quite as saturated.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/24/tech/main595595.shtml
Bill Gates promised in 2004 that spam would be completely solved within 2 years.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I am surprised they conclude the fraction of good mails is as high as 5%.
From the CERN mail server report:
Incoming mails: 1992789
Rejected: 1952787 (98%)
Moved to Spam Folder: 14520 (1%)
Good mails: 25482 (1%)
Spam in Total 99%
And this is a good day. Often good mails are less than 1%.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
check to see if your provider is using SPF... If so, they end up blocking domains that does not have one or is spoofing a domain that does have SPF setup. This helps significantly to reduce the amount of junkmail.
*Headline News* censorship shuts down the Internet! More at 6PM!
Yah, you can cut the rate of bad connections down by about 50%+ if you force the sending host to follow the RFCs.
- Incorrectly formatted HELO/EHLO greeting? 5xx Doesn't catch too many connections as the other end would have to massively screw up in order to trigger the invalid HELO rule.
- Giving a HELO/EHLO that is not a FQDN (fully qualified domain name)? 5xx Many botnets don't follow the FQDN rule and will give a randomly generated HELO name. I've never had a false-positive with checks like this.
- Giving a HELO/EHLO that does not resolve via DNS (see RFC 5321, section 2.3.5 where it talks about this issue in the 1st bullet point)? 5xx or 4xx if there was a DNSFAIL issue
- SPF record says "-all" for the MAIL FROM or HELO lookup and it fails to pass SPF? 5xx (At which point, you're simply following the instructions of the sender. If the record says "-all", they WANT you to reject non-conforming mail.)
- HELO/EHLO which purport to be from your own system? 5xx Know your servers, know who is allowed to put your domain into the HELO/EHLO and boot the pretenders. Easily done in Postfix with a few simple rules.
Most of those are standard checks in Postfix and will greatly reduce the amount of spam that you have to analyze in a more in-depth manner. Which results in a huge CPU/bandwidth savings if you can tell them to bugger off before the DATA command is issued.
I prefer to save block lists for the spam scoring system as there are too many false positives (and sometimes abuses of power) in the DNSBLs. Far safer to score rather then block - although Spamhaus' Zen list is extremely good.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Agreed on all counts, and don't forget adding honeypot MX records, as many bots will either target the highest-numbered MX, or only the lowest-numbered MX. Proper MTAs will follow RFC, and get around the honeypots, to the "real" MX hosts.
By disallowing spamming an ISP has a specific line in the TOS that they can point to when a customer calls in screaming about their "intarwebs" being unreachable. "Yes sir, I understand that you are upset but it appears that we got several reports that large amounts of unsolicited email was being sent from your home, upon further monitoring by our technicians it was established that several thousand spam emails were being sent from your home and in accordance with paragraph 713 in the terms of service we disabled your internet connection, attempted to call you and also sent your a letter explaining the reason for us disabling your connection, if you want to have your connection re-enabled you will have to ensure that your equipment is no longer attempting to send out unsolicited email. You should also know that if this activity continues after we re-enabled your connection your connection will be permanently disconnected.".
Yes, I used to handle abuse cases for an ISP and got to explain things like this way too often, that was basically the opening explanation, most customers would bitch and moan for 10-20 minutes about how we had no right to cut off their precious internets and would claim that their computer was our responsibility (to which I would often reply with a car analogy along the lines of "If you let a stranger load your car full of explosives and walmart refuses to let you park your car in the parking lot, is it then walmart's fault that you can't be bothered keeping your car free of explosives?".
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Doesn't matter. There's no shortage of people who believe spamming will make them rich. Spam isn't going to go away just because it doesn't work.
No sig today...