... arriving at your filters? just curious what people are actually seeing as compared to what the reports are describing as occuring across the board.

Background:

McColo Webhosting is a self-described "bulletproof" ISP that has long known to allow all sorts criminal network activity -- it was shut down tuesday, and network security reports have described a 60-75% reduction of global spam.

-- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/11/the_badness_that_was_mccolo.html?nav=rss_blog

and now ICANN just announced it will be deaccrediting EstDomains, a domain name registrar hugely popular with spam organizations

-- http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/data/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212002478

this is a huge victory for spam fighters, but i'm pretty sure the spammers will recover. McColo will move their operations somewhere else, or someone else who's already established will expand their own operations to pick up the slack.

how long that will take is the question. i suspect it will happen a lot sooner than most people imagine.

11/14/2008 1:29:23 PM

my spam box in gmail went from 3,000 to 2,000 emails this week, so yea.

11/14/2008 1:38:52 PM

i've seen a couple reports along these lines. i usually have about 350 spam floating around in my gmail spam folder, it's down to 10 right now

11/14/2008 1:40:01 PM

My dumpster in Thunderbird has 749 and deletes every 3 days, usually has around 2500 after 3 days

EDIT: Most of those 749 are from 3 days ago though. My regular inbox has received only 6 spam messagesin the last 18 hours - normally it's between 30-50 in the same span

[Edited on November 14, 2008 at 1:54 PM. Reason : s]

11/14/2008 1:48:32 PM

11/14/2008 1:55:45 PM

I thought it was because of changes I made to our mail servers

11/14/2008 1:57:14 PM

heh, you should still tell your boss that it was your deft actions that reduced the spam, and troll for a raise/bonus/promotion.

11/14/2008 1:59:55 PM

this will affect individual accounts, but the REAL effect will be at the systems / admin level.

Gmail, Yahoo, RR, Comcast, and other mail service providers that individuals use, filter a HUGE amount of spam that you, the individual, never even see

no matter how much you think you get, its a fraction of a fraction of what the ISPs and Mail providers deal with. for instance when i worked at MSFT on their EHS team, we handled 30 billion emails per WEEK. and of that total amount, 99% was spam.

fully 90% of the spam (~27 billion emails/week) was stopped at the so-called "edge filters" no one ever saw that stuff. the remaining 10% of the spam (~3 billion emai/weekl) were parsed out through various filtering schemes (custom IP blocklists, header and/or body text matching, image fingerprinting, etc)

11/14/2008 2:05:11 PM

Quote :

"heh, you should still tell your boss that it was your deft actions that reduced the spam, and troll for a raise/bonus/promotion."

seconded

11/14/2008 2:59:23 PM

This is from our spam filter from tuesday of this week to today.


This is from the same period last week.


Overall it looks like we got less email overall and less tagged as actual spam.

11/14/2008 3:05:27 PM

less spam is good, more seems to be getting by my filters though

11/14/2008 3:17:21 PM

I've seen a slight resurgence.

11/17/2008 3:23:10 PM