use Perl

• volume (Score:2, Funny)

  by inkdroid (3294) on 2003.05.05 9:19 (#19796) Homepage Journal

  Thanks for the synopsis Matt. It sounds like things are finally heating up, and that there was a lot of good dicussion going on.

  install SpamAssassin and say goodbye to 99% of your spam problem

  Agreed, the technology exists to avert our gaze from the onslaught of spam. Was there any talk about the large percentage of Internet traffic that is now attributed to spam, and the impact this could have on our networks? Or is this a non-issue?

  Reply to This

  • Re:volume (Score:3, Informative)

    by Matts (1087)

    There was some talk about this. The one difficulty with that argument (and probably why it was only briefly discussed) is that email makes up such a small percentage of internet traffic as it is, and spam is small compared to most corporate email (average of 6k vs about 60k).
    
    The panel that talked about this was the "Economics of Spam" panel. They mostly talked about how a large percentage of the budget of an ISP now goes into fighting spam, and that gets reflected directly in your internet bill.
    • Re:volume (Score:2)

      by vsergu (505)

      Spam may be a small percentage of traffic, but isn't it a large percentage of e-mail traffic, or is that a myth? Or maybe it's large in numbers but small in size, which I don't notice because people aren't mailing me giant Word documents as they would be if I were in a more normal corporate environment?
      
      Isn't the argument not so much about bandwidth as about spam requiring people to have faster hardware, more storage, etc., for their mail servers (and thus greater expenses) than they would otherwise?
      • Re:volume (Score:2)

        by Matts (1087)

        Right. As a percentage of email traffic in bytes it's still relatively small (around 10%), but as a percentage of email traffic in numbers it's large - around 60% now (!!!). You are correct in that you wouldn't notice the bytes thing because you don't participate in the traffic that drives those numbers (the Word documents of the world).
        
        That translates directly into costs in terms of faster hardware, more storage, more administrators, etc.