...when you actually look at the spam (and viruses, and worms)
going
through the Net, the *great* majority of it is pernicious (and hard to
filter)
due to various tricks generally exploiting HTML, encoded text, and
attachments.
It's notable, I think, that very little LEGITIMATE E-mail content (and
relatively few senders) need to send E-mail containing those types of content.
In my case, I would probably enable less than 10-15% of my correspondents to
send me that type of stuff.
[..]
Can ISPs on the list provide some statistics on percentage of legimitate
email coming in as HTML, attachments, base64, etc.
I'd like to see such numbers.
A lot depends on whether you're talking about message volume (percentage of
bytes) or message ratios (percentage of messages, disregarding sizes of
messages).
There are some skewing factors which also need to be taken into consideration,
such as the fact that Hotmail and AOL (notably) as well as Microsoft Outlook
are
perversely set by default to send HTML-burdened E-mail, and by and large
without
any good reason for that. In most cases, it's POSSIBLE to force those services
to send plain ASCII text E-mails, although many users are clueless regarding
even the need for that, let alone how to do it.
But it's fairly safe to say that, once AOL and other such large-volume ISPs and
software vendors get the religion, the great majority of
needlessly-HTML-burdened E-mail would vanish from the Net in short order.
It would also be interesting to see what percentage of the attachments that ARE
sent are of what types (dangrous PIF/EXE/SCR/etc versus safe GIF/JPG/PDF/TXT).
Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment! Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.
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