SPAM causing major issues with ISPs

I am confused as to why the SPAM fight would costs millions and millions in resources. Surely they dont hire humans to look at each mail and then to hit the delete button. Is it not a software program that does it for them, and surely the programme could not costs millions and millions and Rand.
 
I can vouch for this, I work at an ISP and we receive between 40 and 50 thousand Spam mails per day, we had to get two new servers just to handle the volume... Its making life really difficult...
 
Spam chows up bandw , that could have used for valid traffic. Can't these spammers be hunted down and removed from society?
 
Problem is that some of the spammers are ordinary people who don't even realize that their machine is doing things in the background that it shouldn't be...
 
Telkomhater said:
I am confused as to why the SPAM fight would costs millions and millions in resources. Surely they dont hire humans to look at each mail and then to hit the delete button. Is it not a software program that does it for them, and surely the programme could not costs millions and millions and Rand.
Click to expand...

Recognising Spam requires a lot of hardware capacity.

Every mail needs to be checked and it does become a very expensive exercise if 90% and more of mail is actually spam.
 
The fact of the matter is that ISP's allow themselves to be anal raped by spammers. They should stand up and fight back against Spam instead of just trying to process every message possible, requiring more and more server resources.

My zero tolerance to spam has had 1495 (and counting) IP addresses banned from even entering my domain nevermind processing power (I cut off communication on the network level instead of having my spam filter work its ass off trying to process all the messages)

As soon as SpamAssassin flags a spam email with a spam probability of higher than 10, I ban the IP address who sent it. After an hour I release this IP address to check if it re-offends. If it re-offends it's threat level increases on my side to a maximum of 5. Once it reaches 5 I then run a script to extract all the threats into a database for PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian then cuts off all communication entry points from those IP addresses never even touching my precious spam filter or CPU cycles.

I have had over 16000 IP addresses in my database and growing each day. By actively banning an IP address once a spam mail is caught, I cut down on possible spam sent from that IP address by the thousands.

Sure, I don't have the volume of mail coming through that normal ISP's has, but I feel that the ISP's in question are run by (mostly) idiots who don't know their elbow from their ass and have such lack policies regarding spam that it will make anyone cringe at the thought of how they can waste their own money like that tolerating scum.
 
AcidRaZor said:
The fact of the matter is that ISP's allow themselves to be anal raped by spammers. They should stand up and fight back against Spam instead of just trying to process every message possible, requiring more and more server resources.

My zero tolerance to spam has had 1495 (and counting) IP addresses banned from even entering my domain nevermind processing power (I cut off communication on the network level instead of having my spam filter work its ass off trying to process all the messages)

As soon as SpamAssassin flags a spam email with a spam probability of higher than 10, I ban the IP address who sent it. After an hour I release this IP address to check if it re-offends. If it re-offends it's threat level increases on my side to a maximum of 5. Once it reaches 5 I then run a script to extract all the threats into a database for PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian then cuts off all communication entry points from those IP addresses never even touching my precious spam filter or CPU cycles.

I have had over 16000 IP addresses in my database and growing each day. By actively banning an IP address once a spam mail is caught, I cut down on possible spam sent from that IP address by the thousands.

Sure, I don't have the volume of mail coming through that normal ISP's has, but I feel that the ISP's in question are run by (mostly) idiots who don't know their elbow from their ass and have such lack policies regarding spam that it will make anyone cringe at the thought of how they can waste their own money like that tolerating scum.
Click to expand...

Blocking spam is a delicate balance between not getting clients to shout at you due to too much spam and neither getting them to shout due to false positives.

Aggression only heats the fire of client dissatisfaction.
 
Tns said:
Spam chows up bandw , that could have used for valid traffic. Can't these spammers be hunted down and removed from society?
Click to expand...

Mr. Riley should subscribe and attempt to unsubscribe from his own spam list "receive news on special offers". Some wisea$$ subscribed me and ja... the rest is history. I even send emails to hertzner (his ISP...? :D ) and nomino to get them to stop smamming me......
 
I remember there was an Australian that won a gold medal. One of the local papers was kissing his a$$ saying that he was a self made millionaire as well. What they neglected to say was that he should have had his gold medal withdrawn because he made his millions as a SPAM king.
 
AcidRaZor said:
My zero tolerance to spam has had 1495 (and counting) IP addresses banned from even entering my domain nevermind processing power (I cut off communication on the network level instead of having my spam filter work its ass off trying to process all the messages)
Click to expand...

Should work, but how do you know that the spam was really sent from that ip
and not spoofed?
 
What does the CEO of "The Notebook company" know about ISP services?

Maybe he should stick to selling Notebooks and leave the ISP business to "The Internet Company"
 
bleugh

a pox on spammers - we host our own mail server, and I can agree it's starting to get a problem at this stage.

You just can't really block by IP addies as there might be legitimate mail coming from that IP - take Hellskommel's SMTP server for instance - it got blacklisted due to the high volume of spam coming from it, and yet there are people who still rely on Hellskommels to send their mail... :rolleyes:

Other methods are called for - may I suggest the blunt and rusty spoon method? :D
 
kaspaas said:
Blocking spam is a delicate balance between not getting clients to shout at you due to too much spam and neither getting them to shout due to false positives.

Aggression only heats the fire of client dissatisfaction.
Click to expand...

True, before implementing my methods I tested it extensively. I have a 99.999% success rate in identifying spam. I've had 7 false positives and have processed over 145000 messages. Those 7 was due to a config error on my side which was corrected.
 
The_Librarian said:
bleugh

a pox on spammers - we host our own mail server, and I can agree it's starting to get a problem at this stage.

You just can't really block by IP addies as there might be legitimate mail coming from that IP - take Hellskommel's SMTP server for instance - it got blacklisted due to the high volume of spam coming from it, and yet there are people who still rely on Hellskommels to send their mail... :rolleyes:

Other methods are called for - may I suggest the blunt and rusty spoon method? :D
Click to expand...

By far, the method I explained is not the only measure you should have in place. Mine is _only_ for extremes. Its definitely a fine balance and it takes work DAILY to fine tune and get things right.

Telkom's SMTP server being banned had no affect on my policies due to the nature of my setup. I'm kicking ass :p
 
AcidRaZor said:
The fact of the matter is that ISP's allow themselves to be anal raped by spammers. They should stand up and fight back against Spam instead of just trying to process every message possible, requiring more and more server resources.
<--snip-->
Once it reaches 5 I then run a script to extract all the threats into a database for PeerGuardian. PeerGuardian then cuts off all communication entry points from those IP addresses never even touching my precious spam filter or CPU cycles.
<--unsnip-->
Click to expand...

PeerGuardian? A p2p firewall? So you use windoze then. Not ideal is it?
 
TheREV said:
PeerGuardian? A p2p firewall? So you use windoze then. Not ideal is it?
Click to expand...

Lol... huh? PeerGuardian to me isn't a firewall. I have a list of IP addresses that it blocks on the network level. Firewalls has all different kinds of port forwarding and and and...

Sure, not the ideal solution, I'm writing my own app at the moment that will take care of it as a service instead of PeerGuardian doing it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X