On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Tuc at T-B-O-H <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET wrote: > > > I guess I'm still not being clear. There are 120K emails a day coming > > > to INVALID EMAIL ADDRESSES THAT NEVER EXISTED. Its not a case of a user > being > > > fickle, its a case that they are emailing addresses that NEVER EVER > ACTUALLY > > > EXISTED. About 1 ever 3/4 of a second. So running them through ANYTHING > is > > > counter productive since , atleast in my eyes, if you try to email an > email > > > address that never existed... ITS SPAM. Its not things the user ever > sees/knows, > > > etc. I have in my sendmail virtusertable: > > > > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] bingo > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] bango > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] bongo > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] irving > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] nobody > > > > > > The user doesn't even SEE the emails, and processing what they > consider > > > spam I really don't care about. But getting 120K emails to *@ that are > absolutely > > > known spam... I would like to help the community out by reporting them > to every > > > system possible. Yea, if the added benefit is the mail that bingo, > bango, bongo > > > and irving gets filtered a little better... I won't complain at all. > > > > > > Tuc > > > > > > > Just because mail goes to invalid addresses does not mean it is spam. > > people do mistype addresses some time. so this "corpus" is not safe. > > > Yes, I realize people mistype email addresses. But the domain gets > 121,000 emails on an average day. > > Of those 121,000 emails a day, 120,000 are to email addresses that > aren't of the 4 known/valid/acceptable ones. What percentage would you like > to use of emails that are sent are mistyped. One out of 1000? That means > 121 invalid email addresses a day? But the other 999 of 1000 aren't valid... > > Of the other 1000 that ARE to the 4 known/valid/acceptable email > addresses, about 900 of them are marked by SA as a spam level over 5. > Usually WILDLY over 5, like 20's and 30's. > > Of those 100 delivered, 75 of them are rejected by the spam > filter (Using a method that violates the standard RFC's according to > sendmail) of the "final destination" for all 4 of those email boxes (Yes, > bingo, bango, bongo, irving actually all end up forwarded to > [EMAIL PROTECTED]). > > Of the 25 that make it through, the user tells me 15 of them are > usually spam. > > So, 10 VALID/ACCEPTABLE emails a day out of 121,000 emails received > a day .. Or 8 THOUSANDS OF A SINGLE PERCENT. > > So, while I definitely don't think people can type bingo, bango, > bongo, irving correctly 100% of the time, with a valid email ratio of 8 > thousands of a percent, I don't think in the grand scheme of things > that mistyped email addresses really account for much/any. > > Tuc >
If you are proposing some kind of checksums or other types of 'message identifying' techniques on the messages, those few mistyped addresses could certainly make a difference for your site. What if bongo's mom mistypes to bungo, realizes her mistake and resends it to bongo a few minutes later. It is quite likely that the valid message will be rejected now since it's (almost) identical to the one your proposed system just marked as spam. What if bongo signs up for the a mailing list and mistypes his own email address (yes, this happens). Now your system marks all list mailings as spam, so everyone using your system starts losing their copies of the mailing list messages too? I think you have good intentions but the source of your data is flawed for anything but maybe limited statistical training. Unfortunately it probably is not great for that either, since the mail you are seeing for non existent users is probably not at all similar to the mix of spam you get to real accounts. The scanner would end up biased towards whatever junk the spammers desperate enough to use dictionaries send, which would drown out the stats from those spams that are actually difficult to detect. Why do you accept messages for non existent accounts? You're wasting bandwidth, regardless of what you do or don't do with the junk after you accept it. From the sound of it you could reduce your mail bandwidth to a tiny fraction of what it is now by just refusing this stuff (which is what most everyone else does, AFAIK). -Aaron
