ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: [Asrg] A New Plan for No Spam / Velocity Indicator

2003-04-25 20:20:35
At 20:41 -0600 4/25/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:
 > From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com>

 ...
 > >   - A definition of the spam problem based on 89 messages received by
I am bothered by the facile talk from many quarters of a spam corpus
of a few thousand messages collected over months or years.  Characterizing
spam in an academically rigorous way is hard and I heard of no serious
efforts in that direction.  If one doesn't have many current samples
from many addresses at many different kinds of domains, I do not see
how one could claim to have more than mildly interesting anectdotes.
We're talking about a population of 1,000,000,000s of messages sent
daily to 100,000,000s of addresses.  Any sample of fewer than 0.1% or
1,000,000s of messages/day (millions per day!) requires convincing
arguments that it is representative instead of mere anectdotes.


So, 89 isn't a very big number but...

when you back out the *redundancy* (most of those 1,000,000s a day
are like most of the others) what's really there? Granted there may be
some things that cannot be measured without knowing the true volume,
but surely useful information can be derived.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg