ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [Asrg] Removing the incentive to spam

2003-05-14 19:00:59

One fly in the ointment with quarantining and similar, or two
actually, is that many people don't have infinite mailbox quotas to
store all this spam in quarantine.

And when they hit their quota the usual system response is to begin
bouncing email back to the recipient, a very negative (and not
uncommon) side-effect of spam.

The related, second, effect is for people who have limited bandwidth
to their mailbox, 56k still being quite common. Even a fairly modest
32MB mailbox (in terms of modern disk costs) can take over two hours
to download on a high-speed dial-up line (32MB @ 4KB/sec => ~8,000secs.)

That's painful, and I think the numbers I use are quite conservative
for a common profile of user, i.e., many tens of millions.

Since spam seems to be rising rapidly and, I think it's safe to say
tho I won't say I have data, spam msgs are expanding in size due to
the inclusion of graphics etc (often to by-pass spam filters!) the
outlook is bleak and worthwhile taking seriously.

Obviously one can use better tools to profile remotely etc but let's
not be too fast waving our hands making magic tools appear so proposed
solutions look better.

Spam really is an evil problem and one needs a multivariate sieve to
keep all the factors any approach needs to consider in view.

I'd hope as time goes on and the thinking matures we'd be able to
develop some sort of checklist to evaluate any proposed approach
against so it's not always oh yeah, dial-ups, damn, that won't work
very well at all for dial-ups (or whatever.)

-- 
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com           | 
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202        | Login: 617-739-WRLD
The World              | Public Access Internet     | Since 1989     *oo*
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg