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Re: Why Spam is a problem

2002-08-16 10:29:59
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:56:21 EDT, Bill Cunningham said:

So the responsibility should be placed on lower tier ISPs, what about the
main backbone like MAES.

Note that there's a *lot* of private peering agreements in place, and traffic
exchange points like MAES don't see all the traffic.  In addition, it's
tough enough to just *route* traffic at OC-48 speeds, trying to do filtering
intelligent enough to determine spam/not at line speeds is quite formidable
(hint - at OC-48, you're going about 300 Mbytes/sec - this means with a 3K
e-mail, you have all of about 10 microseconds to make a decision before you
start causing delays).

I won't even start contemplating what happens at OC-192 trunks.

Also note that many of the Tier-1 providers have a financial disincentive
to do anything, as they are merely paid to move traffic - and the more spam
the more traffic and thus the more income.  The last thing they want is
for a successful anti-spam campaign when there's already a bandwidth glut
in the core....
-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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