Mon, 16 Oct 2006

Email Servers Will Choke, Says Spamhaus

Yesterday, from midnight to midnight, I received over 850 SPAM messages. In that same period, I received less than 100 legitimate emails, mostly from mailing lists.

If the spammers win, email will become useless. Like Usenet. And that would be a disaster for all of us - business, government and individuals.

The legal battle between antispam organization Spamhaus and e360 Insight is heating up. Spamhaus has a user base of around 650 million, and its lists block some fifty billion spam emails per day, according to the project's CEO Steve Linford. Spamhaus CIO Richard Cox says the immediate issue is that if the domain is suspended, the torrent of bulk mail hitting the world's mail servers would cause many of them to fail. More than 90% of of all email is now spam, Cox says, and he doubts that servers worldwide would be able to handle a ten-fold increase in traffic." Others estimate Spamhaus's blocking efficacy as closer to 75%; by this metric spam would increase four-fold, not ten-fold, if Spamhaus went unavailable.

(link) [Slashdot]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

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On 10/16/2006 10:19:04
Thorolf wrote

Ayup. We use a commercial block/filter service here at work, and approximately 60% of what hits it is spam. Certain listsrvs wind up getting blocked because they use old mass-mailing techniques that have been co-opted by spammers, which makes it difficult to use e-mail the way CERN intended it... :) I can't imagine how bad it would get if the numbers ratcheted up that high - 90% is just staggering.

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On 10/18/2006 21:08:22
Walter Jeffries wrote

I think SpamHaus is about on, 90% of email, or more, is spam. But they aren't blocking that. I have a lot of other filters components that take out spam - they're just one small part of it. Still, I wish them the best against the spammers.

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