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AOL Cans 1 billion Spams In One Day
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Mar 05, 2003 08:59 PM
from the high-water-mark-for-low-water-marks dept.
from the high-water-mark-for-low-water-marks dept.
linuxwrangler writes "AOL announced today that its spam filters hit the 1 billion reject mark for a 24 hour period. This is an average of 28 rejects per day per member. In addition, AOL spam engineers say they receive 5.5 million spam submissions each day from AOL users. Other reports here(1) and here(2)."
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Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
Only leaves 103 apeice...
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
23 February: 1095 spams, 7,821,318 bytes
24 February: 1320 spams, 6,581,776 bytes
25 February: 1700 spams, 6,875,706 bytes
26 February: 1598 spams, 7,910,568 bytes
27 February: 2659 spams, 13,183,247 bytes
28 February: 1436 spams, 6,280,790 bytes
1 March: 1492 spams, 6,917,835 bytes
2 March: 1274 spams, 5,805,475 bytes
3 March: 1488 spams, 6,196,761 bytes
4 March: 1626 spams, 9,023,298 bytes
Thank Ghu for tools like procmail [procmail.org], tmda [tmda.net], and spamoracle [inria.fr].
Parent
Dammit Dad! (Score:5, Funny)
*shaking head*
psxndc
Parent
Re:How? (Score:5, Interesting)
Having all email routed to my inbox means that my figures above include dictionary attacks.
Using tagged addresses also runs up the total a lot. Every time I give out my email address, either on a registration form or in a public posting, I use a different tag.
I started tagging addresses in the early days of spam. Remember when we foolishly thought we could attach a disclaimer to usenet posts along the lines of "send me spam, and I'll bill you $50 under the anti-fax laws"? Well, I was dumb. I figured that in order to "prove" that unsolicited email was unsolicited, I had to have some proof [google.com] of how the spammer got my email address, and that I had a clear disclaimer.
The good news: I have a pretty good idea of which of my online activities generate spam (e.g., posts to control.cancel and *.test, my NIC registrations, and usenet group-creation votes all seem to be popular for the spam-database trollers)
The bad news: I can easily get hit 30, 40, or 50 times for any one mass-spewing a spammer decides to do.
The totals above contain NO false positives -- they're all tied to tagged addresses which only produce spam. Not included are the 50 or so false negatives I get a day, which get tackled through other means [tmda.net].
Parent
But... (Score:4, Funny)
AOL spam engineers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:AOL spam engineers? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:AOL spam engineers? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
What I want to know is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Failure rate? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can partly answer that, and say it's probably a huge number. Bigger than they want you to know. I help out with a local church's Web site. This is a church -- they're far too nice and technically inept to spam anyone. But their site is hosted on a machine that about 100 domains use. Other customers of the ISP HAVE sent spam. AOL blocks at IP address, so all 100 domains are blocked.
So. To answer your question, a LOT of legitimate email is not getting through. I had to work with the church's ISP and AOL spam cops to get them to make an exception for the church's domain. They LEFT the other 98 domains that hadn't spammed on the block list, just because those domains hadn't complained yet. And of course, every now and then, they "forget" that they've made an exception for us, and I have to go over it all again.
Really, AOL gets such big numbers because their system is not very efficient.
Parent
Some are configured to reject ALL outside email (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your guess is that every single piece of spam that gets through is reported?
Parent
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Informative)
To start off with, the information is grossly understated. If we were to find out what is going on with the filtering issue, we would need many more numbers than what they gave us (e.g. total number of mails processed, then broken down by sender, whether the recipient was in the to part of the header or the bcc part, etc).
There are so many factors that go into this that it's not even funny. I run a medium sized hosting company and take care of spam complaints from the inside and outside, as well as deal with filtering. It's not the most interesting job in the world... and yes, I do have clients (business owners) who use AOL for their home dialup service. They tend to be the ones that complain most.
So, to answer your question, yes, from the information we were given, it appears that their filtering is 99.4% successful. Is this at all accurate? Nope.
It's not my fault the moderators don't agree with you. Most of the time, they don't agree with me either. Unfortunately, unless you can think of a better moderation system and get Taco to build it, it's gonna be this way.
Parent
AOL members aren't sending 5.5 million spams a day (Score:5, Interesting)
AOL users are reporting 5.5 million spam messages a day to customer service.
New notification (Score:5, Funny)
*bing*You got mail!
"You have 10 new messages"
"You have 293 rejected messages"
Re:New notification (Score:5, Funny)
*bing*You got mail!
"You have 10 new messages"
"You have 293 rejected messages"
MSG 1> Increase your breast size!
MSG 2> Increase your penis size!
MSG 3> Loose weight fast!
MSG 4> Re: my naked webcam!
MSG 5> Make money advertising on the Internet!
MSG 6> Your unclaimed money!
MSG 7> Horny babes with horses!
MSG 8> Incest rape! W@W!
MSG 9> Make millions in Real Estate!
MSG 10> Do you hate spam? You need this! Only $29.95!
Parent
Re:New notification (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
wouldn't it be easier, quicker and smaller...? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wouldn't it be easier, quicker and smaller...? (Score:5, Funny)
AOL user shocked! "I received a personal message that was not trying to sell me anything! I didn't know this kind of thing existed!" .
AOL engineers responded that this anomaly occasionally happens about every 0.264% of regular mail sent. . .
Parent
not to burst your anti-spam bubble, but . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
every other letter i write to my mom gets rejected. if i am not allowed to spam my mom, who else should be????
Re:not to burst your anti-spam bubble, but . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
It's mutual. (Score:5, Informative)
#
* ! ^X-Loop:.*mydomain
* ^TO_me@mydomain\.com
#
{
# Make a temporary file of the message to be returned
# Discard whitespaces, insert a leading blank
| expand | sed -e 's/[ ]*$//g' | sed -e 's/^/
# Prepare and send the rejection
| (formail -r -I"Subject: Rejected mail: Recipient refusal" \
-A"X-Loop: rejected-mail@mydomain.com" ; \
echo "Sorry, but your e-mail was rejected because the From: header" ; \
echo "didn't seem to include your real name. This is an automated" ; \
echo "message; replying to it won't work." ; \
echo "--- begin rejected mail ---" ; \
cat return.tmp ; \
echo "--- end rejected mail ---" ; \
rm -f return.tmp) \
|
}
Parent
This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Funny)
Today 1 billion voices were silenced. This is not some make believe movie where Alderan gets blown up. It is about the actual usurpation of the Freedom of Speech.
AOL has taken it upon themselves to decide for their users what is appropriate speech and what is not. That is sad. If you think Microsoft is taking away your freedoms because they own 90%+ in the OS market it is time to recheck your bad guys. AOL has just proven itself to be an enemy to Free Speech. That is a much more grave violation of your rights online than anything Microsoft has ever done.
The laughable part of all this is that AOL is the biggest real-world spammer with their tons and tons of CDs that have to be dumped into landfills every year.
Fuck you AOL for making yourself judge, jury, and executioner of the First Amendment.
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
Would someone mod the parent up +1 Funny, please? Because the poster can't be serious. Let's look at a few of the more obvious problems with the post:
Hope this clears up exactly which "rights" have been infringed here -- the rights of spammers to dump 1 billion pieces of mail into AOL users' mailboxes. And I just can't get too hot under the collar about their loss.
Parent
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing the government can't do is supress or prevent you from doing so.
I should be allowed to stand on the steps of the White house and demand that I be given press conference time immediately following the President, just because I am a citizen. But I should be reqected my requests and even asked to shut up and read the Constitution that I tried erroneously to wave in my defense.
And how many spams originate from citizens of USA any way, more from outside I would venture.
robi
Parent
Don't exagurate. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you compare spam-blocking with Nazi atrocities, you're belittling the horror that Nazi victims experienced.
Many of those Communists, Jews, trade unionists, Catholics were often killed in all manner of horrific ways.
By contrast, AOL isn't killing anybody. If AOL blocks spam, somebody looses some money, and an AOL user gains some time, money & sanity.
There can be no fair comparison of these two activities.
Parent
NEWSFLASH: Corporations determine your rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know where this idea comes from that just because you are a business it means that you can do whatever you want, including infringing upon rights guaranteed by the government.
This is a sad double standard being applied to "unwanted" emails. The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them. They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers, they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards, and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums. But spammers don't have these rights?
You better think about that position a little.
Parent
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
-
It doesn't help the wasted bandwidth problem.
-
Since the users don't know what mail they were going to get, there is much less accountability. OTOH, if my ISP blocked the (legitimate) mail I sent, then I can complain to them.
-
The ISP can be forced to implement arbitrary filters like "pro-terrorist", "anti-US", etc by the government and no one would be the wiser.
So this is a first step, but not the Right Thing. I hope ISPs start coming under more pressure to filter their outgoing mail.Parent
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, frea speach. What an overrated 'right' that is. Sorry, but your precious Amendment only prevents the government from shutting you up. There's no reason AOL can't censor you, and there's nothing to stop the Slashdot mods putting you to -1. That was settled long ago; Sanford Wallace, the Ralsky of his day, sued AOL and Compuserve for filtering his junk out, and he lost.
It costs AOL $2 per month per user just to handle the spam traffic. AOL's huge userbase makes them a magnet for dictionary attacks. If you want an unfiltered mail feed, then by all means pay someone extra for spam storage, or run your own mail server.
Parent
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we have not. Spam is the #1 complaint we get from our users. They don't want the stuff, so we're fighting it. We block what they ask us to block.
But, of course, we're AOL and this is Slashdot, so naturally everything we do is wrong.
Parent
Statistical analysis would be nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would really like to see what kinds of spam are being sent and received. Sorta like the Google Zeitgeist, but for mass email.
It would probably have the same #1 term, though...
More proof... (Score:5, Funny)
Its pretty bad when a single ISP gets 1 billion+ spams a day, and that must severely punish their servers. Kudos to AOL (wow...I never thought I'd ever say that) for taking the effort to block the tremendous amount of spam sent to your users.
Spam's not so bad (Score:5, Funny)
Wish me luck.
Serious stuff, this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think the most likely candidate would be to build-in verification of the sender, and bring about the end of anonymous email. That's sure to raise the hackles of many here, but so far, nothing's working.
"Allow all mail" doesn't work? (Score:5, Interesting)
Save those bits! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, including legit emails (Score:5, Informative)
Our listmaster has been around and around in circles with AOL on it several times. It's almost not worth fighting anymore. Use AOL, accept the fact that email you want will not always get to you.
S.O.L? (Score:5, Funny)
What if.... (Score:4, Funny)
Well, a guy can dream, can't he?
Good (Score:5, Funny)
bandwidth usage (Score:4, Insightful)
But what kind of bandwidth would 1 billion spam messages take up? And system resources to process all that excess mail? I bet AOL spends a small fortune on spam - they gotta pay those "SPAM" engineers too.
I hear people complain about spam, but I generally think to myself "yeah yeah." But 1 billion freakin messages is nuts.
Ambivalence (Score:5, Interesting)
wow that's expensive or is it cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would guess that deleting spam is about as expensive as transmitting it for an ISP. that is the processor intensive task of scoring and removing a spam probably is a wash with the processor light task of tranmitting and storing it. Now for the sake of argument lets just guess a wild number for the cost of filtering or passing along a spam. lets say 0.001 dollars.
if that were true then a billion spam deleted would cost AOL 1million dollars per day (plus the ones that got through). that would be a third of a billion dollars a year. THat seems way to high. So it must be less. SO maybe its 0.000001 cents?? that would come to a third of a million dollars a year.
My guess is that the latter is probably a good guess. why? well how many engineers has AOL assigned to the de spamination? perhaps a third of a million dollars worth every year? it would of course not make sense to spend more on de spamination than the harm it costs.
so anyhow assuming this wild guessing is within an order of magnitude then the proper charge to fine a spammer would be some multiple of 0.000001 dollars per spam sent. which is not an awful lot.
so is spam really that costly to ISPs??? Maybe not
Re:wow that's expensive or is it cheap. (Score:5, Informative)
your assumptions are pretty poor, for example:
how can you possibly assume that the cost of a spam is only in 1) the bandwidth required to receive the spam and 2) the amount of processor time spent to score and delete the messages?
The most costly aspect of spam for AOL is the damage to its image, and the consequent loss of its user base. That in turn, has a consequent loss in stock price.
also, i like how you relate the "despamination" costs of the salaries of the engineers with the costs of spam to the ISP.
here's your logic:
"it would of course not make sense to spend more on de spamination than the harm it costs"
well, this is true, but what can you logically conclude from this? only that the harm it costs is AT LEAST as much as the cost of "de spamination"
this DOES NOT mean that:
(harm done by spam) == (cost of de spamination)
as you imply in your post.
in fact, quite the opposite, if I were company, would I embark on an endeavor if I only expected to breakeven? HELL NO. a company would only try to do something like despamification or new features in a piece of software if it expected to come out ahead. This means that:
(harm done by spam) >> (cost of engineers to de spaminate)
also, I think you severely lowballed the cost of the engineers doing the despamification. a third of a million gets you ~5-6 engineers? If they are sucessfully filtering 1 billion spam a day, they need more than that just for the IT personnel keeping the processing power running.
Also, you are confusing the costs to the ISP. don't forget that AOL will still incur the costs of deleting the spam, the costs of the bandwidth to receive the spam, and ON TOP OF THAT the costs of the engineers.
so instead of:
(harm done by spam) == (cost of engineers to despam)
it is much more accurately depicted by the following:
(harm done by spam) >> (cost of engineers to despam) + (cost of bandwidth to receive spam) + (cost of processing power to score and delete spam)
Parent
If you could press a button... (Score:5, Interesting)
An efficient anti-spam weapon (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to get rid of spam, do this:
1. Create a "secret" email account from a reputable provider. Make it unguessable. Add some digits or weird long strings. Don't give it to anyone.
2.Go to spamgourmet.com [spamgourmet.com] and create an account. It's free and open source. In the "forward emails to" field, enter your secret email.
3. Give spamgourmet addresses to your friends. If your account name is Joe6Pack, give your pal Jack Daniels an address Jack.Daniels.Joe6Pack at spamgourmet dot com. To greatdeal.com, give greatdeal.com.Joe6Pack at spamgourmet dot com. This way you know who has what address. Those spamgourmet addresses are disposable.
All the emails sent to your various spamgourmet addresses are forwarded to your secret account.
4. If Jack, who is a friggin' idiot running XP and Outlook, gets yet another Kletz-like virus, the content of his Outlook address book will be compromized and all these addresses harvested by spammers. Just go to spamgourmet.com and disable the compromized address. Tell Jack he's a fool. Give him another disposable address if needed... Until next time.
If greatdeal.com turns out to be a spammer, just disable their address.
5. After a couple of months, disable your old email accounts, the ones that are spammed to death right now.
6. No more spam. Or if you get spam, just disable the spammed address and report the spammer to spamhaus.org. You'll never be spammed more than once.
Works for me.
small company stats... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam became a huge problem here roughly a year ago, and it started taking up too much employee time. So roughly six months ago, we started using Spam Assassin. In that six months, Spam assassin has caught roughly 90% of the spam we get, totalling well over 500,000 spam mails.
Am I crazy, or is 1/2 million spams for only 7 people in less than six months absolutely insane or what? How can anyone argue that these spammers are running legitamite businesses?
I think it's high-time for some legis-fuckin-lation to curb this insanity :)