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Re: [Asrg] A method to eliminate spam

2003-03-20 09:06:34
Matt Sergeant wrote:
On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Chris Lewis wrote:
TOTAL           1885655 100.00
TOTAL BLOCK      316567  16.79 (total blocked)

How come you're such a large entity yet this figure is so much lower than everyone else is seeing? Is it because the companies (like ours) that work in spam filtering are sought out by those with a spam problem, whereas your user base covers everyone?

The figure is much lower than some other people see simply because of an historical accident - we changed our domain name (from the domains in our spamtrap to nortelnetworks.com) a few years ago. We didn't change it because of spam volumes directly, but, the timing turned out to be extremely fortuitous.

[My involvement with the old domain decommissioning was to get the messaging group to stop routing the old domains, rather than simply not using them in From: stamping anymore.]

If you had looked in at our nortelnetworks.com spam volumes then, you'd have seen < 1% spam. Meanwhile, on the other domains that are now in the spamtrap, it was often hitting or exceeding 50%.

If you want to see the "real" picture as to what we would have looked like now without the domain name change, you need to combine our spamtrap and production figures. In other words, if we hadn't changed our domain name, this is roughly what you would have seen per day:

300,000 ham
40,000 + 950,000 spams.

Ie: around 77% spam.

But it's just a matter of time before our production domains get back up to that figure on its own.

2) Lesser used blacklists have higher FP rates, because fewer legit senders hit them. OBrelays is only used by two sites: us, and its maintainer. Despite being _large_ (OB is > 30 million mail addresses), it's still small compared to the coverage of the other lists, hence the relatively higher FP percentage.

Why don't they make it publicly available then?

I can't speak for them.  Sorry.

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