Folks -- this is relevant to David Skoll's proposal yesterday -- the
bounce-counting network.
It's a quick quote from Steve Linford, who runs (or at least is the public
face of) spamhaus.org, so he has some knowledge of the situation.
It's pretty clear if we could correlate the ratio of bouncing/non-bouncing
recipient addresses by source, it could make a good system...
[...] Spammers are so used to everything not working properly that
they wouldn't notice or care much about it. The same goes for
WPoison, most spammers are bulking 50 million spams per day now of
which only a fraction is deliverable. They don't care what percentage
is deliverable or how much is stopped by DNSBLs or spam filters,
since with 50 million going out they'll always get enough through to
make the sales anyway.
Ralsky says that the more he's hindered by anti-spam devices the
higher the volumes he bulks out to compensate for it.
As an example of how much they care, spammers no longer bother
washing their lists of abuse desks or sysop addresses or TLDs such as
.gov or .mil (as a consequence the U.S.Navy now uses the SBL, saying
the amount of spam flooding their ships was getting ridiculous).
Spammer Kelly Joe Ellis specializes in address lists which are
completely Excel generated. He advertises his lists as "100 Million
PC-Generated addresses with 60-85% Connectivity Ratio!". With the
amount of undeliverables these guys are used to, they certainly
wouldn't notice a tarpit or any other anti-spam 'spoiler'. The only
pain they feel is caused by ISPs terminating their leased lines or
hosting accounts.
--j.
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