AOL Cans 1 billion Spams In One Day 460
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)."
Spam solution (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:1, Informative)
How do they know? (Score:2, Informative)
But what puzzles me is how they know I have a
small penis?
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.
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].
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:3, Informative)
- End user reports SPAM to his ISP.
- EU's ISP contacts ISP of spammer and says joe@isp.com is a spammer. Usually through abuse@isp.com.
- If spammer's ISP does nothing and the SPAM continues, EU's ISP blocks entire spammer's ISP.
- Spammer's ISP gets reports from clients they cannot send mail to EU's ISP.
- Spammer's ISP finally kicks spammer off due to pressure from its users not being able to email EU's ISP.
Of course, this is the theory.Not So Hard When... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure what the problem is, but I just discovered this evening that all mail from my Time Warner/Roadrunner account is being bounced by AOL. Gives me some truncated error message, so I don't even know what the problem is.
Cute. :-/
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.
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)
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) \
|
}
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.
Re:Slashdot math at work (Score:1, Informative)
Apples to oranges. The 5.5 million number has nothing to do with the number of SPAM messages blocked per day. 5.5 million is how many spam REPORTS they receive per day. Not everyone reports their SPAM.
We have no idea how many unreported SPAM is received, or how much of that is reported, based on the facts in the article. The humor was the exagerated implication that a lot of SPAM originates from AOL (or at least appears to). I do not believe the 5.5 million number was factored in to the resulting number "15", nor was it intended to be.
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, according to my stats, just about nothing. Oh sure, I get a lot of spam, and a lot of it appears to come from AOL, but it doesn't.
People invent bogus From lines, forge Return-Paths, add fake Received lines, set up PTR records in the DNS of their own netblock to resolve to AOL names.
For instance, one of the latest so-called AOL spams in my spamdump looks like this:
From: "Clement Crow" <o8utyszvc0n@aol.com>
Subject: Buy Phentermine, Viagra & more with NO PRESCRIPTION! US doctors and pharmacies! Overnight Shipping!
The only Received line I trust comes from my own MTA, and it says
Received: from host73.200-82-37.telecom.net.ar (unknown [200.82.37.73]) by {myhost.mydomain} (Postfix) with SMTP id DCFF8ADC4 for {me@mydomain}; Thu, 6 Mar 2003 02:44:15
So this is some clown sending me stuff from Argentina trying to pass themselves off as AOL. Not that I'm trying to defend them, but they're convientient shields (along with hotmail.com and yahoo.com) for spammers to hide behind.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have check out Tarproxy [martiansoftware.com] to see about integrating it into my inflict-pain-on-spammers setup.