From: Fred Baker <fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
I figure any mail message with more than 10 recipients is "bulk."
yes, but a lot of the spam I receive is directed to only one person -
myself or a list. My email address has been sold to someone on a CD, and
they emailed their junk directly to me, or they are posting to some list
that has no spam filter, or whatever. By this metric, it sounds like the
DCC would not have that reported to them.
A message that is substantially different from all other messages is
not "spam" as I and many others see it. It can be illegal (e.g. a
threat of violence, wire fraud, or extortion), offensive (e.g. porn),
"commercial," "soliciting," "promoting," or objectionable for many
sorts of reasons, but if it's not "spam and spam and spam and spam and ...",
then it is not spam. Besides, objectionable mail that is not bulk
cannot fill mailboxes. Genuinely non-bulk mail does not have the
scaling problem of spam.
Other numbers from DCC servers suggest there have been about 400,000
streams of bulk mail in the last 30 days. (The "hash entries used"
in a DCC server that has very few direct reports runs at about 650,000
with an expiry of 30 days. Multiple checksums of a single bulk message
are kept until the non-spam expiry.) It is the fewer than 2000 people
who sent the 100s to 1,000,000s of substantially copies of each of
those 400,000 messages that are causing problems.
However, I suspect and certainly hope you agree with all of that and
that I wasn't clear in how I described the DCC. The recipient totals
that the DCC counts are for all substantially identical copies of a
message sent to any and all addresses using DCC clients. If you send
one copy of a message to each of 500 mailboxes, one copy per SMTP
session, then the DCC can detect it as spam in the first few copies.
The only caveat is that at least one DCC server in the net must receive
reports of 5 to 20 of those SMTP sessions. (Or few SMTP sessions if
some of them involve multiple SMTP RCPT commands.)
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com