A Computerworldarticle reports that Postini’s email management service is rejecting over half the messages addressed to their customers without reading them, based on the sending server’s IP address. 53% of connection attempts are immediately dropped without even looking at the message contents.
Does that sound like a high percentage of rejected mail? Actually, I thought it sounded low. Ive seen estimates that over 80% of email is spam now. Since it’s been a while since I looked at my own numbers, I decided this would be a good time to take a peek at them. I was a little surprised at what I found.
In the last 10 days (that’s as far back as I keep mail server logs), my mail server has rejected 726 delivery attempts because the sending server was blacklisted. Another 47 were rejected because they were sent to bogus addresses (most likely one that I used to use in Usenet postings until it got harvested by spambots). That’s 773 messages that got rejected before they had an opportunity to waste bandwidth. Surely that’s way above 53%.
Nope. It turns out that in that same time span, 725 messages made it through the blockade into my inbox. Some of those were spam, sent from servers that haven’t yet spammed enough to make it onto the blacklists that I use. I don’t keep track of how much spam penetrates the defenses, but I think it’s not more than 5 per day. The rest of those were “real” messages, approximately 70 per day. Yikes! (And that’s just my personal mailbox; my work email address probably gets even more).
How does anybody deal with that much email? A lot of skimming and deleting without reading. Maybe I’m on too many mailing lists. Or maybe the ones that I’m on have gotten too cluttered. I just told John Kerry to take me off his list, after he sent me three messages in one day (well, OK, only two were from him, and one was from John Edwards, sent via Kerry’s list). And I’m still a Kucinich man until the convention (and Dennis is also doing his part to contribute to my mail overload); I wonder if Kerry’s more loyal supporters are getting bombarded even more.
One good note in the Computerworld article was that broadband ISPs are starting to crack down on their customers whose machines have been hijacked as spam zombies. The article specifically mentions Comcast. Maybe they just seem like one of the worst offenders because they’re one of the biggest, but they definitely have their share of customers who shouldn’t be allowed to own a computer. (Actually, I’m starting to think that category includes anybody who is running Windows). Their client IP ranges have been in the major blacklists for a long time. Crunching my logs to see how many messages I’m rejecting from which ISPs is a little tedious, but the last time I did, Comcast’s clueless customers were responsible for several spams per day. Now that they’re getting automagically dumped, I guess I shouldn’t mind, but it really pisses me off that dumbasses who don’t deserve to have broadband connections are unwittingly letting them be used to spam the rest of the world. It would probably be a little less irritating if I wasn’t still stuck in dial-up boondocks, unable to get a service that I’m at least intelligent enough not to allow to be hijacked, unlike the people who do have it.
Oh well, enough ranting. I guess it’s time to get back to deleting “good” messages from my inbox. I see another 15 have arrived in the time that I spent on this article. None of them are spam, but I’m not sure any of them are about anything that interests me. It’s a good thing it’s all electronic and not printed, or I’d really feel guilty about all the dead trees.