"Perry E. Metzger" wrote:
Today, on the date of the 20th anniversary of the publication of
RFC822, let me say a word or two about spam.
Many say "oh, quit whining, just delete it." For the "oh quit
whining, just delete it" crowd, let me note this.
[tale of Perry's own spam woes deleted]
Don't forget the infrastructure stress. Several years back, AOL
estimated that about a third of all email they process is spam. (I
routed the email from Internet to the Washington DC segment of Fidonet
from about 1993 to 2000, and would guesstimate that at least TWO thirds
of that email was spam, but that may be an extreme case.) Add to that,
that spams tend to be fairly large. Even in just plain text, the MMF
and Nigerian scam spams tend to be over 10k. Many of the others are in
bloated FrontPage-produced HTML and/or have pictures attached. By
contrast, a quick check of my inbox shows almost all of my legitimate
personal email received to be under 3k.
Making this factor worse, is the practice of relay-rape. AOL may be
well-prepared to handle a large load of spam dumped on it, but the
web/email/etc. server for, say, Pak's Kimchee Stand over in .kr, almost
certainly isn't. It will suffer essentially a DoS attack at best, and
quite likely permanent damage.
--
David J. Aronson, Software Engineer for hire in Philadelphia area
Resume, and other details, online at: http://dja2001.home.att.net
Looking for work in Philly? Check out the Yahoo group PhillyJobs.