From: "William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com>
Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 08:22:30 +0800
To: "Ross Wright" <rwright@adnetsol.com>
Subject: Re: Spam complaints 14 times worse than Spam.
In-Reply-To: <199705231530.IAA24640@adnetsol.adnetsol.com>
Message-ID: <199705240012.TAA05938@mailhub.amaranth.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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In <199705231530.IAA24640@adnetsol.adnetsol.com>, on 05/23/97 
   at 09:30 AM, "Ross Wright" <rwright@adnetsol.com> said:

>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>

Hi Ross,

With SPAM we have two seperate issues SPAM that shows up in public forums
newsgroups & mailling lists and SPAM that is directly mailed to
individules mail boxes.

SPAM that is posted to public forums is somthing that is hard to do
anything about without draconian measures that I doubt that few would want
to see.

SPAM that is sent directly to users mailboexs is somthing that can be
addressed without extreme measures. Either the Spamfords et al will have
to find a civilized approach to their advertisment or they will all be
gone in a couple of years. The Compuserver vs Cyberpromo lawsuit is only
the first of many. I would imagine that we will see more of these lawsuits
now that Compuserver has won theirs. I am currently receiving 5-10 SPAM
messages per day. Take a medium size ISP with 10,000 customers and you are
looking at 50-100k messages a day tying up resources that are not payed
for by the SPAMers. There is no reason why an ISP should have to support
someone elses advertisment.

- -- 
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William H. Geiger III  http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

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