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more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 04:54:59 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: vijay gill <vgill () vijaygill com> Date: June 28, 2004 10:34:19 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam On Mon, Jun 28, 2004 at 06:32:28PM -0400, David Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: rsk () gsp org Date: June 28, 2004 9:35:55 AM EDT To: vijay gill <vgill () vijaygill com> Cc: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam [ I have rearranged the order of Vijay's comments, hopefully in a way that helps my response make more sense. ---Rsk ] On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 08:56:31AM -0400, David Farber quoted:From: vijay gill <vgill () vijaygill com>For some numbers, please see the presentation by Carl Hutzler, directorof anti-spam at AOL, given at NANOG in chicago a some months ago.I'm well aware of Carl's work: much to his, and AOL's credit, Carl has followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by being an active participant in Spam-L, the Internet's primary anti-spam forum. The interaction has been, I think, mutually beneficial to everyone: Carl has taken away ideas that AOL is implementing, and we have gained a better understanding of the particular problems they face. NOT that everyone agrees on everything: they don't. But peer-to-peer dialogue is happening and progress is being made. Unfortunately, Carl/AOL are rather unique in this regard. Some examples: - Nobody from Comcast has been observed there. - The one person from Verizon who *was* there has announced that he's resigned his position. - The one person from Yahoo abuse was laid off several years ago. Nobody has been seen since. - Nobody from Microsoft has been seen there in years. - I don't recall ever seeing anyone from Hotmail there. - Nobody from UUNet has been seen there in years. - and so on. The fact that these operations have chosen not to participate in the Internet's primary anti-spam forum speaks volumes about their complete lack of committment.
The key part is to realize that not all people agree on what is the Internet's primary anti-spam forum. I've participated in many internet type forums, not just spam, and about 90% of the work gets done by 5% of the people. In the bar.
Do we have any hard statistics on this? I work for one of the above and we fight internal spam hard.Frankly, I don't care about your internal spam: that's between you and your customers. I care about (a) spam that you are emitting
Internal spam == spam generated by the subscriber base to outside people. you do care.
Of course to be fair, we would need to get the results normalized by the subscriber base.I'm sorry, I don't buy the abuse-proportional-to-size rationale. To be "fair", it should be INVERSELY proportional to size, since large ISPs are vastly better situated to handle it than small ones.
Say we can get spam down to 1% of our user base. Depending on where you are sitting, thats still a lot of spam (number is a made up example). We cannot get _every_ single one right away, so normalization is important to see where we are in relation to others. Absolute numbers don't mean anything in this regard.
How many more numbers would you like? And what's the point of my producing them? All but one of these ISPs (AOL) have no intention of actually *doing* anything: if they did, they would have already done so, years ago. They would be leaders in the
I happen to work for AOL, but thats beside the point. The people and resources to fight spam only happen with there is an executive level commit to make it so. And also, fighting spam requires a lot of resources, and unlike the example cited about comcast putting in an offer for disney, its a lot harder to justify to the bean counters. Also, for NANAE/SPAM-L one url http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html There _is_ no magical wand that can be waved to kill spam. This will take time and effort and will only get worse in the short term /vijay ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam David Farber (Jun 24)
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