On Thursday, Mar 20, 2003, at 15:50 Europe/London, Kee Hinckley wrote:
At 5:31 AM -0600 3/20/03, Scott A Crosby wrote:
Thus, I've still thought that the mantra of 'stealing my bandwidth' is
an argument I cannot understand, because of how weak it is. I have no
The problem isn't an end-user problem. It's a mail-server problem.
Matt just posted a stat showing that spam accounted for 5% of all
email traffic. (And it's mail traffic I'm concerned about--since it's
the bandwidth to my mail server that's a problem.) I'll give good
odds that that was percentage of *delivered* mail. (Matt?)
No, that's the percentage of mail we do. We have no idea at that point
if it can be delivered or not (we don't keep individual username
details on our servers).
Spam is 50% of all email. But the average email size is 60k (this gets
bloated to the high end by word documents and other large things that
get emailed around, but it's still an accurate average). The average
spam size is 6k at the moment.
So at 1/10th of the size of regular email, spam accounts for 5%
bandwidth wise.
However, on the flip side, we still have to apply aggressive filters to
every email we see. Our virus filters are extremely aggressive (but we
don't have any false positive problems there - about 2 FPs every 10
million mails), and so it takes us about 1 second to process a mail,
*regardless* of the size.
So while spam is only 5% of the bandwidth, it's 50% of the processor
time. That's 100% more servers we have to buy just because of spam.
Hope that helps ;-)
Matt.
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