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)."
What I want to know is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your guess is that every single piece of spam that gets through is reported?
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.
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.
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:5, Insightful)
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It doesn't help the wasted bandwidth problem.
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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.
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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.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
Re:Spam solution (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:This is the most important story of the year (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Serious stuff, this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your phone isn't barraged with spam calls because it costs money to have someone sit and talk to you and try to get you to buy stuff. Just enough money such that you only occasionally get a call from a telemarketer. Apparently, the response rate for most spam is high enough that the costs associated with getting a reasonable level of responses/sent messages are less than the profits from doing so. Thus most people get piles of spam.
Much like telemarketing, the way to stop spam is at the termination point, the user. If spammers don't make any money, they won't spam anymore.
The solution isn't to take capabilities away from normal users, the solution is to make it so hard to be a spammer(that makes money doing it), that no one is a spammer anymore...
Re:What does this have to do with my rights online (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Failure rate? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ambivalence (Score:3, Insightful)
It's censorship from the standpoint that they are making a determination for their users as to which content is acceptable and which is not. "Controlling the use of their own property" would be a valid argument if they simply tightened their acceptible use policy in regards to their own users, and restricted access to their own mailservers by preventing open relay, checking for mangled headers, referencing blackhole lists, etc.
The point at which I think it goes too far is when AOL starts analyzing messages and deciding for their users whether or not a particular message is in fact, spam. I think what would be better is to give the users tools that would allow them to filter their own mail (ie, reject messages with specific keywords or combinations of keywords, like penis+enhancement or Nigerian+ambassador).
I would even be satisfied if AOL simply ranked email with a spam meter, and then flagged the message as "Possible Spam" or something. As long as the message itself is actually delivered to its intended recipient. The user can then decide for themselves if they choose to trust AOL's ranking system and simply auto-delete anything flagged, or if they want to inspect it themselves.
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.
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably very little. If you've ever used the AOL client interface, you'll understand what I'm talking about. It is, perhaps, the lamest mail client around.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:4, Insightful)
> choose to trust AOL's ranking system and simply
> auto-delete anything flagged, or if they want to
> inspect it themselves.
The user can decide for himself whether or not to use AOL at all. By choosing to use AOL he chooses to accept AOL's filters. There's no censorship here.
Re:Serious stuff, this... (Score:1, Insightful)
Another fallacy is that spammers really make money - they aren't really engaging in a profitable venture, except their ability to steal other peoples' resources allow them to engage in ridiculously low-return, large-scale solicitations.
"Stopping spam at the termination point" is ultimately ineffective. It becomes a never-ending spy-vs-spy game that ultimately catches legitimate mail and continues to consume system resources and bandwidth while not addressing the true problem.
If spammers were unable to exploit third-party relays, things would change. Then they'd have to set up their own relays, pay for their own bandwidth, and execute more responsible marketing campaigns in order to avoid being globally blacklisted. The solution is amazingly simple and it has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or freedom of expression.
Re:wow that's expensive or is it cheap. (Score:3, Insightful)
The main costs of spam are probably:
1) the increased bandwidth required to accept all that spam into AOL's network in addition to all the other Internet traffic coming in
2) the increased capacity of their mail servers to store and process all that spam in addition to the legitimate mail they have to process
3) the cost of employing an entire department of people whose job is to try to reduce the amount of spam going around
4) support costs from customers who complain about receiving spam that should have been blocked or about not receiving legitimate mail that was blocked by mistake
5) badwill (opposite of goodwill) due to the association of their company with spam (everybody knows - or thinks they know - AOL users receive more spam than users of many other ISPs)
Did I miss anything?
Re:How? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NEWSFLASH: Corporations determine your rights! (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, if you're such an advocate of free speech, there's at least a chance that you know what it means, right? So you know that the notion of free speech-- as a literal right, not as a principle-- is embodied in the first amendment to the Constitution. Right? And you know, therefore, that the first amendment defines what your right to free speech actually is. Right?See the important part right up there in front? "Congress shall make no law." (Surely one of the most beautiful phrases ever uttered in the English language, by the way. Right up there with "We the people.") It doesn't say "AOL shall make no acceptable use policy." AOL is a private company, not a public agency of the government.
Now, let's talk about your comparison to the KKK. You said,
The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them.
Let's get more specific about this. The first amendment doesn't give anybody a right or the permission to do anything. It merely puts a restriction on what the government can do. So instead of saying that the KKK and the NOI can advertise because the first amendment protects them, it's more accurate to say that Congress cannot prevent the KKK or the NOI from advertising because the first amendment protects them. This distinction is important, as you'll soon see.
They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers...
By Congress? No. The KKK cannot be barred by act of Congress from advertising in newspapers. Can an individual newspaper refuse to run a KKK ad? Yes. The first amendment doesn't apply here. The first amendment doesn't say, "The New York Times ad sales department shall make no business decision abridging the freedom of speech." The first amendment, if I may personify, doesn't give a damn what The New York Times ad sales department does.
The same thing applies to the bit about billboards and the bit about open forums. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, and that includes billboards and the Internet.
But spammers don't have these rights?
Yes, they do. Spammers, just like you, me, and the KKK, have the right to speak their minds in whatever medium and on whatever message without Congress getting in their way. The first amendment guarantees that. Since, however, AOL is not Congress, the first amendment does not apply to this situation, and the spammers' right to free speech is not being abridged.
You better think about that position a little.
Right back atcha, OG.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed.
By choosing to use AOL he chooses to accept AOL's filters.
Agreed.
There's no censorship here.
I disagree. AOL *is* censoring the information that reaches their members' inboxes by filtering that material based on AOL's criteria, and not necessarily the criteria of their individual members. As I said before, I would have no problem with AOL taking measures against spam if those measures were largely passive in nature (ie, flagging incoming messages that meet certain criteria as "Possible Spam" and giving each individual member choices as to how they want to handle those messages). My problem with AOL's approach is that they are preventing those messages that AOL considers spam from ever reaching their customers' inboxes.
Granted, one man's "censorship" is another man's "filtering service." I just think that AOL would be better served by giving their users the power to filter their own mail, rather than taking a "my way or the highway" approach to it. At the very least, the users should be given the option to choose whether they trust AOL's spam filter and want to just let their mail be deleted, or whether they want it routed to a designated "spam" folder of their inbox where they can verify it themselves.
Those who live by the sword... (Score:3, Insightful)
How can AOL complain? The spammers are just
following AOL's lead!
Does anyone else find it fitting that AOL [those responsible for a flood of "XXX FREE HOURS" discs each week in my snail mail, magazines, and breakfast cereal] should suffocate under an avalanche of their own electronic hellspawn?
There is sweet justice after all!