On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 01:49:31AM +0100, the entity calling itself Daniel Hartmeier 
stated:

> > Thanks for your encouragement. Maybe I'm reading the pfTop output
> > incorrectly, but doesn't it say that _my_ resource cost on this
> > transaction was 335K packets and 13 MBytes of bandwidth? If so, I
> > wouldn't call this "no effect" on my resources.
> 
> Obviously, it costs you as much bandwidth as it costs the sender, as any
> packet the peer sends, you receive and vice versa. But you don't waste as
> much CPU cycles, disk space and memory as the peer does. You might have
> delayed the entire queue of the sender by two days, who knows ;)

Yes - I think that's called "The Law of Conservation of Packets" :)
Not being familiar with SMTP/ESMTP I guess I was just surprised that 
there were so many of them.

> 13MB in 48 hours (that's just 78 bytes per second) is considered a tiny
> stream by most people. If, for some reason, this means significant cost
> for you, don't run spamd. Just blocking the port with RST is cheaper.

I guess it probably is, but it seems significant for 1 single spam host
(to me, anyway). I don't suppose you could switch to block via RST at
some packet/byte count threshold, eh?

Thanks for the insight,
Jay

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