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I went looking through some mail server logs for information on how many
challenges were going somewhere and how many never made it anywhere.
First, the disclaimers:
1. This is only MY spam; yours may be different.
2. I considered anything from <> to be a challenge, but that's not
necessarily true.
3. All numbers gathered with Perl and grep and such. I could have made a
mistake.
That out of the way, the numbers are:
1133 apparent challenges (note TMDA log says it sent only 1100)
320 (28%) delivered
729 (64%) bounced
84 ( 7%) still in queue (perhaps this is the margin of error)
Those 320 deliveries were to only 272 unique addresses. As I look through
those addresses, some clearly are spammer addresses, and some look like
real people. In some cases, it appears that a spammer forged a message
from me to X (e.g., owner-mutt-dev@), who then responded ("Non-member
submission"), and got a challenge.
I looked at messages that entered the mail system during a period of about
20 days. I looked at a period of five days after that for deliveries, so
the "still in queue" messages have been there at least that long.
I'm only challenging spams that SpamAssassin scores less than 11, and I
don't challenge anything that fails SPF checks. I wouldn't be surprised if
that influences the numbers somehow (i.e., maybe higher scoring spams are
more likely from forged addresses).
Anyway, I thought others might find that interesting.
- --
Kyle Hasselbacher | Between two evils, I always pick
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | the one I never tried before. -- Mae West
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