What percentage of the Internet Traffic is junk?

Thu May 6 16:22:04 UTC 2004

On 5-mei-04, at 21:55, Steve Gibbard wrote:

> If a few of you can stop being so pedantic for a second, the definition
> looks pretty easy to me: traffic unlikely to be wanted by the 
> recipient.
> Presumably, if it's being sent that means somebody wanted to send it, 
> so
> the senders' desires are a pretty meaningless metric.

Exactly.

> The harder pieces are going to be defining what traffic is unwanted in 
> a
> way that scales to large-scale measurement.

I think if someone sends something back that isn't an error, then at 
some level the traffic is desired. However, this only works at one 
layer in the stack: DDoS packets aren't replied to, so they can be 
categorized as abusive at the IP level. However, even though spam 
emails aren't replied to (hopefully, and not counting bounces), the TCP 
port 25 packets flow in both directions, so at the IP level spam isn't 
abusive.

(There are a few corner cases where legitimate traffic only flows in 
one direction but this is very unusual.)