anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

Sat May 4 15:35:29 UTC 2002

Scott Granados <scott at graphidelix.net> writes:

> No I think your message illustrates things pretty well.  I guess the 
> fundimental differenc here is not only does it cost usually very little 
> to receive these messages it costs even less infact dramatically to send 
> spam.  It seems there is no real reason for the spammer to be concerned 
> with whether the mail is properly targeted or not so a full on flood is 
> possible and the leads generated by this flood percentage wise have to 
> be many factors less than the percentage of success in snailmail.

It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam.  At my real job (ie,
not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive)
commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum
during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii
accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats
script).  It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip
through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE.

So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial
product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra
cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional
influx.  In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become
measurable too.

Spam is theft, plain and simple.

                                        ---Rob