From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 15:09:51 MDT
I don't delete junk mail, I save it to its proper folder. Just in
case somebody should ask me to document the extent of this scourge.
Today my /home filesystem filled up rather unexpectedly, and when
I investigated I saw that my junk mail folder had grown to almost
a gigabyte in size. Time to do some chopping and counting.
My junk mail consists of
1. unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam)
2. worms attacking Microsoft e-mail clients.
Since I cannot reliably distinguish both types, the numbers are
perforce combined.
Period: Count: Volume (MB):
(1999) 122 0.5 Sep 20 - Dec 31
2000 890 5.4
2001 1665 18
2002 10215 95
(2003) 12586 837 Jan 01 - now
This year's enormous increase in sheer volume is probably due to a
surge in large Microsoft worms.
There is another kind of spam-related abuse that doesn't figure in
the above numbers. An uncertain number of spammers expropriate my
name space and send out bulk mail as from <random-name>@mips.inka.de.
Some of it bounces and the error messages travel back to <random-name>,
which doesn't exist here (causing another bounce). I started
examining these bounces for information where the original spam had
come from (Microsoft Exchange is notable here for replacing the
requisite information with garbage spew), but gave up after collecting
more than a hundred IP addresses spread all over the Internet address
space. Apparently there are large-scale relay networks in place.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jun 27 2003 - 15:41:15 MDT