on Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 12:58:51PM -0700, Brandon Long via mailop wrote: > I used to think, when I ran my own server, that five or so spam messages a > day, what's the big deal... until I just got tired of it. It was often > more than the actual useful messages in my mailbox every time I checked.
I've had the same email address since oh, 1996 or so? I've run my own email services since 1997, and have invested a great deal of time into making sure my filters are good, at one point for our company and its hosting clients and nowadays for a very small userbase (think in terms of single-digits). We block according to a wide variety of criteria, and quarantine/flag on some others. We eat our own dog food and don't rely on anyone else's filters, though we do query a few for stats purposes and the very occasional quarantine exception. Yesterday (FSVO "yesterday") we blocked 12 messages for being sent from known-bad ASNs alone (after a couple of months in which said ASNs sent 288 that we let in and tried to send another thousand or so). That's out of a total of 310 rejections today. And that doesn't count the 6 419s we got from random sources, the several offers of sales lead lists and contact lists, SEO offers, loan/financing offers and other garbage, that we quarantined and blacklisted. This out of a total mail load of 649 messages - not bad compared to the bad old days when spam accounted for over 95% of all inbound, but bear in mind I've also got about a full quarter of IPv4 blocked at the packet level, so I should also include in that number another 59 unique IPs that made port 25 connections, bringing us up to 708, or around 60% spam/ham if you don't account for any filtering at all. And the vast majority of the ham was from lists, such as this one. So for practical purposes, non-list mail was probably still in that 95% neighborhood. Dealing with the stuff I had to quarantine ate up at least half an hour, in various chunks, while I'm in Montreal at M3AAWG to talk to other people who are either trying to send or block or manage and should be down on the floor talking to them instead of sitting in a hotel room. And that's NOW. Imagine what a waste of time it's been over the past 23 years, given that we have already invested in filtering (14+K lines of sendmail m4 code, a dataset of classifications for ~96.3% of IPv4's PTR space for filtering and quarantining, a set of ~90K blacklisted domains, etc., etc.) and for the most part ONLY have to handle the edge cases (419s, cold calls, and new idiots) and imagine how tired I am of it. And I've never had a userbase more than a few hundred or several thousand if you include the various mailing lists we hosted over the years, which we still had to provide filtering for. Everyone has different spam loads and tolerances, as you mentioned. To extrapolate from an obviously VERY light load to anyone else's actual experience is misguided. It just smacks of "JHD" and comes off as the sort of dismissive and disrespectful attitudes we've been trying for decades to rid ourselves and our various communities of. As for whether we still need spam folders, I can see all sides - you do risk missing FPs, and senders need feedback (or not, depending on if you think the sender is legit), and users deal with their own spam tolerances in wildly different ways. We still have a quarantine folder, mostly because I would rather waste my own time than both mine and that of the other users I serve. Without quarantine, they have to forward the stuff they think is spam to me AND I have to deal with it. YMMV. I make no claim to understand what a Yahoo! or GMail have to deal with. -- hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/ Internet security and antispam hostname intelligence: http://enemieslist.com/ _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
