more on 4 Rivals Almost United on Ways to Fight Spam

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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, 
> > director
> > of 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

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