Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

On 23/12/04 03:56 +0000, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:
<snip>
Your MUA is breakling threads and quoting. Please fix.
> Typical spam messages (once you strip the HTML garbage out of them) tend to
> be 1K-5K bytes long.  So even if they were all 5K, you're talking about
> storing something like 200,000 spam E-mail messages (for however long the 
> user bothers to keep them before they finally purge them, either actively
> or by simple timeout) for about ONE DOLLAR.
I however, would be looking at the network costs of accepting that data
in the first place. If you say that a message on disk is 5K and the
transactional overhead is 1K, you are looking at an increase of 5 times
the traffic by volume for spam. Now consider that you are speaking of
stripping a 15KB mail to 5KB, implying that you will be accepting that
15K of traffic in the first place.
And for any non trivial mail server, you are looking at massively
expanding CPU capacity to deal with the traffic volume (hint, mail
servers are optimised for disk and memory access, not CPU).

> So what's with all this crap about it being so onerous to "accept and store" 
> this stuff?
The store part is bad enough. The accept part is where the really scary
and costly things happen. 

To draw an analogy to information security, your ideal goal is to
prevent malicious traffic from getting in as far down the stack as
possible. You do not want to allow traffic in and hope that malicious
traffic is caught and rejected by your IPS, you want the firewall at the
edge to stop it. Apply the same logic.

> As for TEMPORARY E-mail storage (say at a POP3 server), mind you that it is
> the ISPs themselves who create that monster by trying to discourage users
> from setting up their own POP3 servers (which in fact is extremely simple
> to do, if you have a machine which is online and running essentially all
> the time).
The "running all the time" is what /users/ down't want to do.

Devdas Bhagat

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