RE: [IMail Forum] Somewhat OT, Spam and Bandwidth

[Dan Barker]

Title: Somewhat OT, Spam and Bandwidth

I use SpamAssassin to classify Spam (it's WAY over 99% effective - see http://www.visioncomm.net/sac).

 

It's so effective I don't even look in my spam box any more. I have IMail clear any spams over 30 days old. Currently, it's 118M in size, and contains 13,576 spams (only 3 weeks catches, I used to POP3 pull them).

 

SpamAssassin adds a report to each, so 4K of each spam was generated locally.

 

Let's assUme that Spam is flowing 1/3 of the time, and 2/3 of the time the spammers are on coffee break<g>.

That's 28,800 seconds of spam-time.

At 9K each (5K after removing the SpamAssassin reports), that's 67M in 28,800 or seconds 2,400 Bps. At roughly 10 bits/byte for serial communication, that's 24,000 bps or 10% of your bandwidth. I wouldn't worry too much.

 

But check the pricing anyway. Bandwidth is good.

 

I used to be on a 512K fractional T for $960 a month. I decided to upgrade to a full-T1. I called my provider and asked how much the upgrade would be. They quoted $954/month. So, I trippled my bandwidth capacity AND SAVED $6 a month.

 

Dan Barker

 

ymmv<g>.

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Glenn Bullion
Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2004 8:42 AM
To: IMail_Forum
Subject: [IMail Forum] Somewhat OT, Spam and Bandwidth

We have 70-80 users here.  For our net connection, we're running a fractional T1, 256K.  In terms of what comes in and out of the building, we have email, of course.  Users are allowed to surf the Internet.  We have a few tiny services that run that are allowed from the outside, such as a website and a Citrix box. 

In trying to download files, service patches, whatever, I noticed that our downloads are all pretty slow.  The obvious answer is to get more bandwidth.  But I did a spam count recently to check to see how much we're getting.  In a day and a half we captured 2,856 spam items, and that's just the spam that was caught.  I'm sure there was some that wasn't caught.  I know we're getting much more spam then legitimate emails with the low number of users we have.  I don't know much about how email is delivered, how long it takes, etc.  But can all this spam really be hurting our net connection?