I think that the discussion of accuracy is misplaced. I don't think
we need to measure to n decimal places here. In fact I don't think
we need any decimal places.
We have two pieces of information that I think most significant:
1 Spam is growing at an exponential rate (10% a month by the most
conservative estimates).
2 The spam senders are using countermeasures to bypass filtering.
The types of information I think IS interesting is information that
gives a handle on the character of the problem. In particular
- Proportion that comes from list kiddies (small fry who bought
a list) vs garbage creators (major spamhaus)
- Rates of growth of spam from different sources.
- Whether certain countermeasures have been applied in more than
5% of cases.
- Proportion of spam sent through open relays - to 10% or so.
I am not interested in the precise figures as they will change. We
are dealing with an enemy that will change its behavior in response
to our own.
Clearly there is an s curve here, there is a limit on the exponential,
however 1) I don't know where it is, 2) I have no way of estimating
where it might be and 3) I suspect it depends on us comming up with
a countermeasure.
If no spam sender ever uses forged headers we could cut out a lot
of spam simply by whitelisting for the major ISPs known to implement
rate limiting. I doubt that such will remain the case for very long.
Phill
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