From: "Ross Wright" <rwright@adnetsol.com>
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 23:51:25 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Spam complaints 14 times worse than Spam.
Message-ID: <199705231530.IAA24640@adnetsol.adnetsol.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


This was from:

Tasty Bits From The Technology Front

 Your Host:  Keith Dawson

    This issue: <URL:http://www.tbtf.com/archive/05-22-97.html>

..Mailing-list spammers..

    Email spam is the favorite gripe of most Netizens, excepting the
    spammers. Congress is considering legislation [25] to limit the
    practice of sending unwanted commercial email in bulk. Not everyone
    thinks this is a good idea. See [26] for a thread from an ongoing
    debate on Declan McCullagh's fight-censorship mailing list. George
    Matyjewicz <mosaic1@ix.netcom.com> did a modest experiment on a
    week's worth of his email -- he is on 56 mailing lists and gets
    around 200 messages a day -- to gauge how widespread the problem
    actually is. Matyjewicz posted these results:

                        week     avg/day

      Total messages    1,354    193.4
      Spam messages        10      1.4     < 1 %
      Spam complaints     189     27.0      14 %

    Mailing-list owners share information on the addresses from which
    commercial spam messages originate. Recently Alexander Verbraeck
    <A.Verbraeck@duticai.twi.tudelft.nl> posted a particularly compre-
    hensive list of purported spammers. I have taken the liberty of
    preserving a snapshot on the TBTF archive [27], sorted both by email
    address and by "virulence" -- the total number of messages sent by
    each spammer over a given time period to two of Verbraeck's lists.
    Thanks to Tom Parmenter <tompar@world.std.com> for the tip.

    [25] <URL:http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C10875%2C00.html>
    [26] <URL:http://www.tbtf.com/resource/to-ban-spam.html>
    [27] <URL:http://www.tbtf.com/resource/spammers.html>

=-=-=-=-=-=-
Ross Wright
King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services
http://www.slip.net/~cdr/kingmedia
Voice: (408) 259-2795