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Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 16, 2006 03:02 AM
from the bracing-for-the-wave dept.
from the bracing-for-the-wave dept.
Rub3X writes, "The legal battle between antispam organization Spamhaus and e360 Insight is heating up. Spamhaus has a user base of around 650 million, and its lists block some fifty billion spam emails per day, according to the project's CEO Steve Linford. Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox says the immediate issue is that if the domain is suspended, the torrent of bulk mail hitting the world's mail servers would cause many of them to fail. More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic." Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable. The article paraphrases CIO Cox as saying that the service will continue "even if there is a short-term degradation."
Related Stories
[+]
IT: Spamhaus to Ignore $11.7M Judgement 471 comments
6031769 writes, "As reported on CNet, Spamhaus is choosing to ignore a judgement of $11.7M against them in an uncontested trial in an Illinois court. According to Spamhaus, the judgement has no impact on them, since they are a British organization." From the Spamhaus reply to the judgment: "Default judgments obtained in US county, state or federal courts have no validity in the UK and can not be enforced under the British legal system... As spamming is illegal in the UK, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to UK law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."
[+]
Perspectives on Spamhaus's Dilemma 420 comments
The Illinois court that told Spamhaus to stop blocking the spammer filing suit against them — an order which Spamhaus ignored — is now considering ordering ICANN to pull Spamhaus's domain records. While Gadi Evron, whose blog posting is linked above, urges everyone to beat the judge with a clue stick, a guest writer on his blog counsels much greater restraint. Anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince explains how Spamhaus got into its current pickle — apparently by following conflicting legal advice at two points in the process — and what they might have to do to get out. One spamfighter of my acquaintance says that Spamhaus's SBL and XBL blocklists knock out 75% of the spam at his servers before it hits and requires more CPU-intensive filtering. If ICANN is ordered to unplug Spamhaus from the DNS, and does so, is the Net prepared to deal with a 4-fold increase in spam hitting MTAs overnight?
[+]
IT: One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End 632 comments
kog777 writes to mention that Spamhaus has released a final warning about an increase in junk email, as they prepare to lose their domain to an Illinois court ruling. From the article: "According to Spamhaus, more than 650 million Internet users - including those at the White House, the U.S. Army and the European Parliament - benefit from Spamhaus' 'blacklist' of spammers that helps identify which messages to block, send to a 'junk' folder or accept. Losing the domain name would make it more difficult for service providers and others to obtain the lists. 'If the domain got suspended, it would be an enormous hit for the Net,' said Steve Linford, Spamhaus' chief executive officer. 'It would create an enormous amount of damage on the Internet.'"
[+]
IT: ICANN Grants Temporary Reprieve to Spamhaus 271 comments
daringone writes "ICANN released a statement that says they "...cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend or place a client hold on Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name" They do, however leave the door open for the registrar that registered the domain name to then be forced to turn the lights off for Spamhaus."
[+]
IT: Judge In e360 Vs. Comcast Rules e360 a Spammer 156 comments
Brielle Bruns writes "Yesterday, Judge James B. Zagel dismissed claims against Comcast by e360. In the decision, the judge says: 'Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.' This clears the path for Comcast's counter-suit." e360 is the spammer that got a default judgement against Spamhaus, as we have discussed on numerous occasions.
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I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.
I still think they 3360 guys just look and smell like spammers. That spamhaus aggrees just adds to this conclusion. Here's what seems to amount to the spam histroy of the "plantiff". [spamhaus.org]
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Insightful)
I think most internet users still remember what it was like before spam filtering became common. Wait a few more years. Then users will take the filtering for granted.
-matthew
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
Most users probably don't remember the rate of spam before filtering was common for a number of reasons:
Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered. Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.
It would be a much deserved wake up call if spam filter companies were to shut down operations for a few days. It's obvious that the bodies overseeing this case think of Spamhaus as little more than a novelty. I think Spamhaus needs to send a crystal clear message, and perhaps the most effective way to do that would be to show the world how green the other side of the fence really is.
Parent
The Judge's reaction ..... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered.
So much of it happens server side the end users would have no idea as to the amount. My home mail server which handles a handful of users gives me these stats. and this is just for the 8.5 hours of "Today":So that's just over 800 pieces of crap for today (so far) Those are server-side filters, not client side.
Parent
Quantum mechanics. (Score:5, Funny)
Spam percentage of a 474 message inbox could only be 100%, 99.78903%, 99.57805%, 99.367089%, 99.156118% ....
Thought it would be funny, but it is not, but I am not going to waste all that typing calculation I did, so will hide behind anonymity ;-)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to explain why they don't do this. They know that only clueless email admins rely only on an RBL for Spam control. Only the "Spamhaus faithful" would get clobbered with the extra Spam and they would have to switch to a different method or lose their jobs. This would be a sure way to kill off your customer base by proving empiracally why a single point of failure in Spam detection is a bad idea.
I've seen as much bad behavior from the RBL maintainers as I have from the spammers, so I only use an RBL as a final check to hold email that is on an RBL but otherwise passes through the filter. The (very few) held emails are almost always legitimate. The only reason I even bother to hold them is to keep an eye on what's going on and kill the final few Spam emails. The system I use for my employer has an almost perfect rate of rejection. Most of our users get fewer than 10 Spam messages a year! I get a lot of questions from co-workers about how to deal with Spam in their personal accounts because we do such a great job of dealing with it in their work accounts.
I know the Spamhous fanboys will take offense at this post. My only comment is that you are free to use an RBL as your only Spam control if you wish, just as I am free to use what I consider to be better methods. Good luck to you if Spamhous ever goes dark for any reason -- you're gonna need it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And what exactly can we do about the problem? I'm part of the general population in this case, how can I help? I secure my machines (so no spam zombies for me), I don't buy from spammers or companies advertised by spam, and I'm not within the court's jurisdiction so I can't petition it (even assuming they'd listen, whi
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is the result:
Spamhaus gives only further sub-5% improvement on top of greylisting with a positive feedback loop at delivery/user report level. With relay level content filtering feeding into the feedback loop that will be down to under 3%. Greylisting on its own does 90%+.
The CPU cost of greylisting is not that much higher compared to DNS blacklists (and on a large site you can dynamically gate greylists into a local DNS greylist zone for distribution). In fact it is less if you form temporary firewall reject lists from your greylisting database.
So the answer is: technically Spamhaus is full of shit and the floodgates will not open. On most well managed sites it will be just another day. A bit more SPAM, but not a lot. At most it will make admins tune feedback loops into grey/black lists a bit better.
Move along people, nothing to see here. Spamhaus should stop dragging the rest of the internet into the stupid internet governance battle which is not for them to fight in the first place. I already commented on their position on this issue in past Slashdot posts on it.
Spamhaus should stop talking BS and move their operations to the same domain as their legal country of residence.
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummmm, they didn't go to court and they have not accepted anything, Spamhaus are demonstrating their view that the court does not have jurisdiction, Spamhaus seem to have a clue what they are talking about but the judge isn't listening since they refused to recognise the court by showing up. And if push really did come to shove then Spamhaus would probably just "reboot the company" in a different country.
I've been in front of a few judges in my time and IMHO many of them are the most arrogant people you could possibly imagine. I know very little about the US court system but I am guessing a district judge is not very high up the judicial foodchain and would have a hard time shutting down the internet no matter how hard he bangs his gabble. Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.
Parent
Buggy post (Score:5, Interesting)
GP was missing the link above.
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC they asked the original (state, district ?) court to move the case to federal.
_Then_ they didn't turn up at the federal court because they _then_ decided they didn't accept its jurisdiction.
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Interesting)
He lied on the jurisdiction issue, and if that takes Spamhaus off the network, then millions of us suffer economic damage from the result of his perjury.
Anyone in Illinois want to register a class action against the son of a bitch?
-jcr
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:5, Funny)
I hope it's like you say, because in the media it came more like this:
Spammer: I'll sue you!
Spamhaus: Sue me!
Spammer: I sue you and I sued you! Your domain is goin' away!
Spamhaus: Oh no we give up, omg world prepare for e-mailmageddon! Fair well, fair well!
ICANN: We can't take your domain, Spamhaus.
Spamhaus: Oh what tragedy is before us, pitty us and you and... ICANN, you can't? Hmmm (damn it)
Spammer: I continue suing you and will win anyway!
Spamhaus: Oh no, world see how unfair the world is prepare for spamornado, spamunami, we're all doomed! Oh I pitty my sad fate! Oooh... Noo! Oh oh...
Random Observer: Dude stop making ass of yourself, you need neither the domain, neither you're the only solution for filtering spam out there. Take it like a man and maybe start respecting the court.
Spamhaus: Shut up observer, you're interrupting my dramatic routine.
Parent
Re:I say let the spam come (Score:4, Informative)
"The" legal system? You make it sound like you think there's only one. Here's a clue: the US legal system is just one of many legal systems in the world. Spamhaus is based in the UK, where we have a somewhat different legal system. It is not reasonable to expect people based outside the USA to know (or care) how the US legal system works.
Parent
Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Funny)
I am so ready to walk away from cars. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from television. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from radio. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from life. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
I am so ready to walk away from my legs. I just need someone to point me to a workable replacement.
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Here. [wikipedia.org]
Here. [wikipedia.org]
Here. [wikipedia.org]
Here. [wikipedia.org]
You can't walk away from your legs. Not with the same legs, at least.
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Here. [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:4, Informative)
Spammers now send their messages in MSN and ICQ invites/authorization requests.
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
() The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the problem is not this simple. Spammers today send their emails from millions of hacked computers worldwide. They will just continue to do so, and these charges will drop on the clueless users whose computers are used to send the emails.
As long as computer security is as bad as it is today, there just is no easy solution to spam. All hyper-clever ideas about encrypted network id:s, black and whitelists, hashcash, etc, are just temporary solutions --- they only serve to drive the spammer to more intensly use the fact that a hacked computer also gives access to an online identity.
Parent
Re:Someone please tell me they have an alternative (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Two lists needed (Score:5, Interesting)
kdawson at it again. (Score:5, Informative)
216.168.28.44
204.69.234.1
204.74.101.1
204.152.184.186
#
No need to HUP -- once the file is created and filled with those IPs, it'll pick them up automatically. You can easily install dnscache with the other tools on your mail servers for 0 interuption of service.
Cheers.
Interesting legal argument. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
While I do not doubt Spamhaus' credentials as really nice people, this is hardly relevant to the case in question.
Re:Interesting legal argument. (Score:4, Interesting)
The next interesting legal argument here is, that the judge seems not to be a judge, but a referee. His job is not to descide what's right and what's wrong, but to make sure the rules of the game are observed. They can't even descide that the case does not belong before them.
The last interesting legal argument is, that if the one who's sued doesn't appear, the one who sues gets all they want. Hell, they should have asked for a billion or two along with eevryone working for spamhaus and their children, relatives and frieds as slaves (for the next 7 generations). By the logic of the US legal system, they might just have won that as well.
Would I have appeared bofore them? And let the spammer force me and my non-profit organization to accept to be financially crippled by the spammer's for-profit ressources? No, I'd have shown them the finger as well (living in Europe and feeling there's a lot of nice areas for vacation that are on this side of the pool, so I don't really need to visit the US).
Parent
Spamhaus is correct (Score:3, Informative)
If Spamhaus goes down though, ten more RBLs will pop up. It's necessary to stop spam. And they're right... most mail servers on the Internet are not capable of handling the sheer amount of traffic if they were not also hanging up on bogus SMTP connections before even receiving content information. You ever wonder why your e-mail is delayed? This is because your ISP is queing mail processing because they can't handle it all at once. Without relay blacklisting, e-mail would be even slower and likely interrupted. I'm not suggesting that Spamhaus is that important, but what they do in theory, is.
All I can say is, pray that IPv6 doesn't get adopted or it will be even worse.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? There will be more IPs, but if everyone has a permanent IP it will be easier to block offenders and infected machines.
How can having IPv6 make it worse? (Score:3, Interesting)
No one will be hiding behind NAT's or using dynamic IP's with IPv6. These two abuses of IPv4 addressing are the main reason why it is so difficult these days to track down and control sources of network abuse, including spam. This will make it easier to make computers and people responsible for them accountable for their actions, which means spammers and people who insist on running insecure operating systems can no longer hide or deny responsibility so easily as they can now.
Suggestion to spamhaus (Score:5, Insightful)
That list would then serve as a perfect permanent black list for all sysadmins who happen to think that people who sue spam lists might not be the kind of people who send worthwhile emails.
I would actually recommend even higher priority to that list in the spamassassin config file than spamhaus' regular blacklists
Spamhaus have their problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for an ISP providing dedicated server hosting & colocation. Recently a couple of our customers contacted us saying that they had appeared on the Spamhaus blacklist, and were consequently having trouble sending e-mails. They claimed that they had not involved in any spamming activities, and that this listing was therefore incorrect. We found out that Spamhaus had blacklisted a range of our IP addresses (specifically a
While it was indeed true that we were hosting a server for this person, Spamhaus had a) blocked an address range larger than the IP addresses involved with this spammer, and b) would not offer any proof that the spammer had been using the server we host for him to involve in any spamming activities. When we contacted them, they refused to unblock this range unless we suspended the account of this spammer (again without providing any proof of activities conducted from our network that would breach our TOS), even though they acknowledged that the range they were blocking involved innocent customers. For us to suspend him at the request of Spamhaus would have been US breaking our contract with him, as there was no indication that he had violated our AUP (which DOES prohibit involvement with spam).
When we refused to break our contract with our customer at the request of a third party (perfectly acceptable position imho!), Spamhaus said that if they blocked any of our customers in future, they would blacklist our entire network (which is a considerable amount of addresses). This is unacceptable in my view, they are essentially trying to hold us to ransom without providing any proof of activities. When talking with some other ISPs, we heard of similar stories. In one case, the ISP concerned suspended the spammer's account and contacted Spamhaus to have their blacklist removed, and were told that "due to under-staffing, Spamhaus would not be able to remove the blacklist entry for a couple of days. however, if they would like to make a donation to spamhaus, they would remove the entry much sooner".
To reiterate my earlier point, Spamhaus does provide a valuable service, there's not much doubt of this. But they way in which they are organised leaves a lot to be desired!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
SPAM is a serious problem (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Okay... Postage... But? (Score:3, Insightful)
Suuuure, it's worked so well to get Americans to give up their SUVs and take public transit to slow the flow of all the oil money that supports terrorists. And those bounties have helped us get Osama Bin Laden in custody. Right?
Questioning the Math/Assumptions (Score:5, Informative)
Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable
I think the math is a lot more complicated than this implies. Here's how I'd work it:
- P = % Spam (% of all sent mail)
- S(T) = Total Mail Sent
- S(S) = Spam Sent
- S(N) = Non-Spam Sent
- E(T) = Overall Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
- E(S) = Spamhaus Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, Spamhaus Only)
- E(O) = Other Filter Efficiency (% spam detected, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
- F(T) = Overall Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus + All Other Filters)
- F(S) = Spamhaus Type II Error Rate (% false positive, Spamhaus Only)
- F(O) = Other Type II Error Rate (% false positive, All Other Filters w/o Spamhaus)
- R(T) = Total Mail Received
- R(S) = Spam Received
- R(N) = Non-Spam Received
We're interested in R(T) and what happens to it with and without Spamhaus. (Assuming we're still interested at all, since math sometimes does thatWith Spamhaus:
- R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
- R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(T)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(T)]
- R(T) = P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)]
Without Spamhaus:- R(T) = R(S) + R(N)
- R(T) = S(S) x [1-E(O)] + S(N) x [ 1-F(O)]
- R(T) = P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)]
The difference, expressed as a ratio of (Without Spamhaus - With Spamhaus)/(With Spamhaus), is[ P x S(O) x [1-E(O)] + (1-P) x S(O) x [1-F(O)] ] - [ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x [1-E(T)] + (1-P) x S(T) x [1-F(T)] ]
The assumptions yielding either the ten-fold or the four-fold increase seem to be that E(O)=0, and of course that false positives don't matter. Even with these assumptions, the math in the OP is a bit fuzzy to me:
- E(O) = 0
- E(T) = E(S)
- F(O) = 0
- F(T) = 0 [i.e., F(S) = 0 as well]
- [ P x S(T) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] - [ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
- Which Reduces To:
The ten-fold increase seems to be predicated upon both P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=1. However, even if that were true, the increase would actually be nine-fold (.9/.1).yields (reducing above ratio):
Divided By
[ P x S(T) x (1-E(T)) + [ (1-P) x S(T) ] ]
P x E(T) / [ 1 - [ P x E(T) ] ]
The four-fold increase seems to be predicated upon P=.9 and E(S)=E(T)=.75. However, this would yield about a two-fold increase of
[.9 x
Factoring in false positives might actually make the Without Spamhaus scenario more dire, but clearly it would be less dire if we assume that E(O) is not zero. A better approximation would use the marginal efficiency of Spamhaus. Even with a generous assumption that Spamhaus catches an additional third of all spams sent (vs. all others without Spamhaus, and ignoring false positives), the overall increase in R(T) looks less than 50% to me (.3/.7, or approximately 43%).
You do not win a fight in the U.S. court system . (Score:4, Insightful)
Really. It doesn't work, unless, of course, you are the President, warning judges about terrorists.
Still, I've argued this point before; there's at least a few points of dispute [slashdot.org] regarding jurisidiction, and spamhaus should have showed up in court.
It doesn't matter if they are ultimately right; what matters is that it is not 100% clear cut, and as such, a judge will give a plaintiff a great deal of leeway in a default situation.
servers choking... (Score:5, Informative)
October 15 2005 :
Pieces of spam blocked by realtime blocklists: 9062
Top blocklists:
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 7193
bl.spamcop.net 1648
dnsbl.njabl.org 221
October 15 2006:
Pieces of spam blocked by realtime blocklists: 47429
Top blocklists:
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org 40631
bl.spamcop.net 5240
dnsbl.njabl.org 1558
As spamhaus is currently rejecting 40631 emails which consequently don't have to be processed by spamassassin, it would be definitely be felt on this server were Spamhaus to become available. In fact, the reason I started using RBLs to begin with was due to one of the Spamhaus ROKSO culprits sending about 20,000 messages per hour to a dictionary list of users at a hosted domain. The server was dying then, but using OpenBSD's pf databases together with the spamhaus SBL, the problem was stopped cold.
Re:I work for a company... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can back up the AC's statement. I work for an IT multinational and our e-mail servers run close to the edge. If we were to see a significant increase in e-mail levels, be it x4 or x10, or even x2, our e-mail system would grind to a halt. We, along with every organisation have become totally dependant on e-mail. For example, one of our customers requires that financial information it sent to the Bank of England by close of play every day. It is sent using (encrypted) e-mail. A delay of a few hours would give us major headaches. And yes, we could use alternative methods but it would take some time to put these in place.
If the preditions came true it would be bad for us.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Trying to block spam is like... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Trying to block spam is like... (Score:4, Interesting)
For some reason, most people do not consider that as a realistic possibility. Personally, I think it should be illegal to be stupid, in a lot more situations than it is today.
This isn't exactly revolutionary. People are already being put into jail, for buying stolen goods, if the police can demonstrate that "they should have known it was stolen". And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder. And if you are a surgeon and kills a patient through malpractice, you are also in deep trouble.
The society needs more legislation against stupidity, not less. It's too easy to excuse away all the damage you have done, by putting up the "I'm stupid" excuse. So, yes, let it be punishable for up to n years in jail, to through stupid or uninformed actions, create life more profitable for spammers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Use the UK server name! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad how this statement is becoming more and more associated with freedom nowadays.
Parent