Brian Keefer wrote: > Mmmm, not necessarily. It would take pretty much every MX host on the > Internet to make a significant impact on spammers with dedicated > equipment, such as the IronPort A60 that can maintain (it claims) > 10,000 simultaneous connections.
So can my old 486/66 with enough memory. If you mean maintain 10,000 live, active SMTP connections then great. So ? Economics is at the backend. SPAM is only associated with viral (i.e. distributed) transmission because is makes things cheap; If the professional marketeer / Spammer can afford legitimate infrastructure, then they probably have some economic value proposition that makes the need to use random targetting unviable. A bit like legalising drugs should get rids of the problems created by drug dealers - but not the other negatives associated with the end product. > The spammers that don't use dedicated Spam MTAs (and IronPort is by > far not the only one) are using compromised boxen on broadband, so > they don't even have to pay for the bandwidth or other resources. There is a bit of altruism here too - every connection you absorb and waste the time of is one connection that doesn't go somewhere else. I am not sure anyone has done any valid studies, but I wonder what the cost increase needs to be to make much of the "1 in 1,000,000 responses" SPAM uneconomical ? 50% ? 100% ? And is this increase in costs solvable technically, without allowing a monopoly to reinvent Internet e-mail ? This is now way off list. Sorry. Peter
