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Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

2004-12-24 20:27:57
gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:

On 23/12/04 03:56 +0000, gep2(_at_)terabites(_dot_)com wrote:

Your MUA is breakling threads and quoting. Please fix.

Sorry you don't like my MUA... but I do.  Likewise, sorry you don't
like my quoting style... but I don't much care for the stuff that
other programs generate (like at the top line of this reply) either.
Inevitably, after editing quotes and removing extraneous stuff, and
quoting several levels back, it becomes nearly impossible to
maintain integrity of "who said what" (and in fact, it rarely
doesn't much matter WHO said something anyhow... I'm quoting and
referring to IDEAS, if you really care _who_ said what you can refer
back to the archives if you want to).

How much of that is due to you quoting only the first line of a
paragraph and making the rest look like they were written by one
person up the stack?

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. 

I have NO idea how you made THAT leap of logic.  TYPICAL [text-type!] spam 
messages (in my experience, anyhow) have LARGER [full!] headers than the spam 
body itself (the main exception is spams which use text-as-image and 
attachments 
to conceal the message content from content-based antispam filters).  Maybe 
you 
just worded your comment badly, but anyhow I'm not sure what you meant maybe.

As far as the smtp protocol is concerned, the email headers are
treated just like the email body: part of the DATA segment.  The
transactional stuff that occurs earlier is EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO,
and stuff like that.

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).

I fully agree that one of the goals should be to reduce total aggregate 
bandwidth wasted by spammers.  Discouraging them from sending large, 
HTML-burdened, and/or attachment-laden mails on an unsolicited basis (by 
reducing the likelihood that such mail would ever be delivered and read) 
would 
help to achieve that.

In this universe, discouraging spammers doesn't seem to cause them to
send less spam.

The "running all the time" is what /users/ down't want to do.

SOME users would like to do that (*I* would, for example), so it's ludicrous 
to 
generalize like you're trying to do.  Those users with cable or DSL 
"constant-on" connections, and whose systems are up essentially full-time, 
could 
easily enough host simple POP3 servers.  

Oh, great.  Yet another way for them to serve as zombies for spammers.

Seth

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