Re: [Asrg] Removing the incentive to spam

[Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>]

On May 14, 2003 at 21:59 tbartel@assurancesys.com (Tom Bartel) wrote:
 > I am an email packrat (I suspect there are others like me) and one of my
 > webmail accounts currently has 1347 messages totaling 36.9MB in storage
 > space.  The messages go back several months.  I would guess this is
 > potentially the upper end of the bell curve, but don't have a clue. 
 > Again, maybe someone on the list possibly has some data points for this.

A few percent of the mailboxes on World are >50MB, there are quite a
few >100MB, some as much as 300MB. Admittedly it drops off rapidly
with less than 10% > 32MB, but that's all way above what you suspected
I think.

 > > Since spam seems to be rising rapidly and, I think it's safe to say
 > > tho I won't say I have data, spam msgs are expanding in size due to
 > > the inclusion of graphics etc (often to by-pass spam filters!) the
 > > outlook is bleak and worthwhile taking seriously.
 > 
 > I'm not sure how the inclusion of graphics increases the storage size of
 > mail.  It seems many spam messages now commonly use images to display
 > the "text" portion of their message, but the images are references to
 > external servers with fully qualified links.  Unless spammers are
 > encoding and embedding graphics in the message using multipart/related
 > MIME, I don't think HTML email adds to storage size.  It may infact
 > reduce storage size.

Yes, spammers encode the images in-line as base64 MIME parts.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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