Brad Templeton wrote:
On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 07:01:40PM -0500, Alan DeKok wrote:
Hi Alan (how's mother ;-) and Brad,
Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> wrote: My concern was that dropping the amount of spam by 3 orders of magnitude isn't enough. There are ISP's getting 100's of millions of spams a day. Even at 1/1000 the rate, 100,000 spams a day is problematic to deal with.
Even companies do, as a comparison to overall population. We get approximately a million spams/day. We only have 50,000 users, and somewhere around 300K legitimate emails.Surely no more than a couple of ISPs get that sort of volume?
However, the key test is this -- what's the volume compared to that of normal mail. If, for example, it's 1% of normal mail, there really isn't a server load question of significance. If currently spam is 80% of all mail, a factor of 1000 would make it .4% of all mail. Is spam now over 80% of all mail?
In some cases yes. Ours is getting close to 80%.
The economics are such that it's viable for some of the high volume spammers even at that reduced return rate.In theory, though not yet proven, I think if you dropped the effectiveness of spam by 3 orders of magnitude, the spammers would actually cut back their activites.