It depends a lot on how and particularly where spam is measured.
Most naive measurements, I'd say 99% of what we hear about, only care
about what hits an end-user's screen.
By that time it's had to run a gauntlet of blocks at sources, blocks
at ISPs, and whatever spam filters are in the user's MUA.
So the report of reduction could just as well mean that any one, or
all, of those are improving.
Or of course that less spam is being sent out.
Those of us more involved in the infrastructure of the internet tend
to be at least as concerned with the volume of attempted deliveries of
spam. The gates may hold back the barbarians, but you still have
barbarians at the gates!
Perhaps that leads to some useful taxonomy since the model is pretty
straightforward.
Volume of spam sourced, volume of spam which leaves the network it's
sourced from, volume received at providers, volume delivered to a
mailbox, and volume seen by an end-user.
Those are all different measurements and each interesting in its own
way.
--
-Barry Shein
The World | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com |
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg