* * * * *

                         The evergrowing spam problem

While I was staying at Hotel Negiyo [1], I had the chance to talk with Rob,
my old roommate—he's a sysadmin there at Negiyo. We chatted for a bit about
the server compromises I experienced [2] then drifted towards the new anti-
spam measures he helped to implement at Negiyo.

Obligatory Sidebar Links

* Cash Bounties for Spammers win Limited FTC (Federal Trade Commision)
 Backing [3] (reg. required)
* FTC mulls bounty system to combat spammers [4]
* Bounties Are Not the Answer to Spam [5]


Quite impressive actually. The router sitting in front of the email system is
actually one of two that are synchronized; if one goes down the other can
immediately take over without dropping an existing TCP (Transmission Control
Protocol) connection. The network traffic then goes to one of several load
balancers which send the traffic through one of fourty dedicated systems that
do nothing but scan the email, looking for signs of spam. It's more of a
filter, as these systems then send the traffic on towards the actual email
server for actual delivery. As the email filters through the dedicated
system(s), it makes a determination if the email is spam or not, and updates
a database system with a yea/nay flag that the SMTP (Simple Mail Transport
Protocol) server can then query and deal with the spam as the customer would
like.

The volume of email they handle just in Boca is staggering—Rob showed me the
statistics for the previous day: 15 million pieces of email. Even more
impressive (and depressing) is that out of 15 million pieces of email, more
than 80% was classified as spam.

Eighty percent!

Out of 15 million emails delivered, over 12 million was nothing more than
spam.

Talk about depressing.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/09/25.1
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/09/19.1
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27220-2004Sep16.html?nav=rss_technology/techpolicy
[4] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5326107/
[5] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1648051,00.asp

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