Re: [Asrg] Re: ISPs and bigger fish

[Pete McNeil <madscientist at microneil.com>]

On Saturday, July 24, 2004, 2:20:57 PM, Jim wrote:

>> I have first hand reports that this is true.  One fairly large cable
>> ISP [..] to keep all the mail flowing, because it was cheaper
>>
>> What made the difference was an even larger ISP telling them to clean
>> up their act or their users wouldn't be able to send mail to the
>> larger ISP any more.

JW>    Hmm, there's *always* a bigger fish..

JW>    And what's the biggest fish of all?  The companies that run the
JW> internet backbones.  Why aren't they hoping mad about the spam problem?
JW> (other than that for them to open and scan every packet to even *see*
JW> the problem would be a massive bottleneck)

I have a sad thought about this... it seems to me that there is some
economic disincentive for these folks to do anything. On the one hand
taking any action on the spam problem would cost them money to cover
the complexity, support costs, and hardware. On the other hand the
level of spam is driving up the bandwidth needs for everyone - so
solving the spam problem would depress their growth. Seems to me
that's two reasons for backbone providers to do nothing - and finally,
since they are only "network" they can more-or-less legitimately say
that it's not their problem. Spam is an email problem - way above
layer 3.

We show that nearly 80% of email is spam based on the logs sent back
by our Message Sniffer users - that's a lot of bandwidth. See:

<http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Performance/FlowRates.jsp>

If you're a "big fish" - why would you want to get involved in all of
that mess knowing that the outcome would ultimately be a reduction in
demand and an increase in costs?

_M



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