millenix(_at_)zemos(_dot_)net wrote:
No matter how much we wish, the Internet economy will not become efficient
for the sake of stopping spam. That price increase will never occur,
because there won't be upstream price increases in the domain registration
and web-hosting businesses.
Agreed.
So far as incentive goes, I just got my hands on an interesting set
of data. It's stats for about a week of email traffic, from a system
monitoring a large proportion of the SMTP traffic on the net.
The quick conclusions are:
- a simple whitelist of 75K IP's would allow 90% of non-spam
messages through, some volume of spam, and would block 10% of
non-spam messages.
- to allow 99% of non-spam through, the list would be ~200K IP's.
- 120 IP addresses account for 10% of the sent messages.
So there are ~200K IP addresses which send small to large amounts of
non-spam, and which stick around for most of the week. "Legitimate"
senders with miniscule sending volumes were not included in this
sample.
These numbers mean that we know have a bit better feel for
deployment costs of any solution. A solution which covers ~10^5 of
the largest sending IP's means that greater than 90% of the legitimate
traffic will be included in the solution.
These numbers are relatively small, which makes it much easier to
believe that the spam problem is solvable.
Alan DeKok.