On 2023-11-19 at 14:02:04 UTC-0500 (Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:02:04 +0000
(GMT))
Andrew C Aitchison via mailop <and...@aitchison.me.uk>
is rumored to have said:
On Sun, 19 Nov 2023, Bill Cole via mailop wrote:
On 2023-11-19 at 06:59:37 UTC-0500 (Sun, 19 Nov 2023 12:59:37 +0100)
Alessandro Vesely via mailop <ves...@tana.it>
is rumored to have said:
I don't think someone can drop almost all mail and still call itself
a mail server.
Were you running a mail system in the early-mid 2000s?
At that time, I tracked the performance of a mid-sized spam control
system for a business that handled around a million inbound SMTP
sessions per day. The proportion of mail we rejected as spam was
persistently over 90%, and at times broke 98%. We never had a
significant FP problem.
Although the server I ran at that time did listen to the whole
internet,
our MX pointed at a service that spared me from much of that spam,
though I was aware of it and knew the folks stopping it for me.
The state of email is better today,
That is a surprise to hear. Reading this list has given me the
impression
that the spam volume is worse now than it was then. Spamming is a much
bigger
business now and the internet is faster, so I would have thought
spammers
would be sending more messages, even compared to the increase in
legitimate
email.
If they are sending comparatively fewer messages I can only imagine
that is because their strike rate is better, which is *more* worrying.
What have I misunderstood ?
The biggest contributor to the reduction in spam:ham ratio from what
I've seen is a decline in the volume of blatant spambots operating on
compromised personal devices. Right behind that would be how much more
B2C marketing mail people are eager to receive. Years of nominally
legitimate businesses sending bulk mail with marginally acceptable
practices have conditioned people to accepting more mail as "ham" today
than they did 15-20 years ago.
And that could of course be particular to the SMB mailboxes of my users.
Maybe non-business mailboxes are seeing more garbage, but my
junk-catchers at GMail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, iCloud, and GMX haven't seen
it. (They suffer from the flaw of having absolutely zero legit exposure
to commercial entities, so they are not 'typical' freemail accounts.)
The volume of junk hitting those mailboxes (both Inbox and "spam folder"
delivery) has dropped over the past few years.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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