Re: [PLUG] cultural ethics of email and spam

["Brent Saner" <brent.saner@gmail.com>]

you're vastly focusing on the business model here.
residental (and even some small businesses) mail servers don't get the amount of spam to where it becomes unmanageable (trust me on that. used to work for a little tech shop that AFAIK didn't have any filtering at the ISP level. the admin set up a bayesian and spam assassin and we rarely saw more than one spam every two days if that.)

it all has to do with being smart about it. publicly displaying a direct e-mail is a no-no. using an e-mail addy you don't want spam to get to for a mailing list is a no-no (because many mailing lists, such as PLUG, publicly archive- as they should. but crawlers find e-mail addys from this). you should have at least one e-mail account in which you don't care what goes to it (preferrably at the hosting of another; gmail or yahoo, etc.) and one personal e-mail account that you only give out on a one-on-one basis.

On 10/17/07, Brian Stempin <brian.stempin@gmail.com> wrote:

<cross posting seems appropriate here>

a pretty serious issue?  really?  half-joking, are your internets
getting stuck in your tubes because of all the Chinese emails?

admittedly, I'm not a full-time mailserver admin, but I've asked the
question before, why it's worth more of your time (or hiring someone)
to sort categorize spam from other email rather than just throwing
more bandwidth at the problem?

maybe this is how shanghai and the rest of the world (who have
affordable fibre optic internet upstreams) prefer to deal with spam --
just ignore it.  and the only reason USA residents get a bee in their
bonnet is because they don't have bandwidth parity?

Yeah, I'll ignore it when it subsides.  In today's environment, most companies that run email servers either have to (a) buy more or larger mail servers, (b) install some sort of spam appliance (sonicwall, dedicated SpamAssassin box, etc), or (c) both -- all just to keep up with spam!  More bandwidth does not solve these issues.  Granting more bandwidth to mail servers does not reduce the computational cost of processing and delivering all of that mail.  Furthermore, spam filters are often times cheaper than a server, easier to administer, and they can filter spam for multiple servers or even an entire cluster.  Guess which route most travel?

In regards to the part where you state that the rest of the world prefers to deal with spam by ignoring it:  so does the US.  They're called spam filters and blacklists, and they can be found at many ISPs and private email servers the US and world 'round.  In fact, some people are even willing to pay to have this done for them.

I don't know why it is that you so fervently advocate that bandwidth will solve the issue at hand, but I can say this:  You seem to have taken nothing into account except for bandwidth.

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-- 
Brent Saner
215.264.0112(cell)
215.362.7696(residence)

http://www.thenotebookarmy.org
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