[Milsurplus] e-mail address harvesters of QTH.net

[mikea]

On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 05:58:24PM -0500, Bob Camp wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have been dealing with electronic junk mail for at least the last 
> twenty years. I started out paying $200 a month phone bills to haul it 
> around. Needless to say that's a bit more than it costs any of us 
> today. The question is how much are you going to give up to eliminate 
> spam.
> 
> Ok, in order to execute spammers on sight we might want to define 
> exactly what spam is.
> 
> Anybody want to take a crack at an exact definition of spam?
> 
> Certainly I know spam when I see it, but that's a pretty flexible 
> definition.
> 
> How about a loose definition of spam?
> 
> Ok, 75% of the mail is spam (as opposed to 75% of the traffic). Mail 
> only makes up a small percentage of the traffic on the internet. We at 
> least should have a loose definition ....
> 
> Be careful anything inside the definition and you will be shot on sight 
> ....

I run the spam filters at a major state government agency in 5-land; I call
it "WeBuildHighways". I've been dealing with spam since we got the agency
on the Internet, in 1986. We're our own ISP, with transit bandwidth through
a state-owned, state-mandated bandwidth provider. We own a lot of fiber
along state highways, and lease some of it to that bandwidth provider, in
return for a free ride through their network.

I describe my job as "I come to work, put on my waders, step into the
cesspool, and fish around for diamonds. There aren't many diamonds, but
there's a lot of other stuff." At the moment, I've got about $75K of
mailfilter servers (MailScanner, SpamAssassin, and ClamAv, all under
FreeBSD, on IBM xServer 335 boxes) doing the job. I'll see ~15K mails per
day inbound, up from ~6K a year ago. The delta is _entirely_ spam.

The working definition that I and my colleagues around the world use is
"spam is Unsolicited Bulk E-mail". The mailadmins at major ISPs use that
definition. So do most of the other ISPs in the US and Europe.

I'd be happy for a chance to divert a big river through this particular
stable; the size of the problem is well past merely Herculean: the best
guess for the number of zombie machines that send spam is ~1.5E8, which
represents computing resources that dwarf anything any nation can bring to
bear on any problem.

Milsurplus content: some of our machines did come from the military, 
once upon a time. 

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin