Ok, so the question of when is the best time to "spam" has come up. I cited
the ReturnPath 2004 study
(http://returnpath.biz/pdf/time_deliverability_0704.pdf), but now the
question of when we think the Net is most congested (more likely to see
overloaded MX servers and delivery failures?).
Anyone have any data on such? Sorry if this question seems offtopic here,
but I figure the question of net congestion data is appropriate.
-Dennis
Dennis Dayman wrote:
Ok, so the question of when is the best time to "spam" has come up. I cited
the ReturnPath 2004 study
(http://returnpath.biz/pdf/time_deliverability_0704.pdf), but now the
question of when we think the Net is most congested (more likely to see
overloaded MX servers and delivery failures?).Anyone have any data on such? Sorry if this question seems offtopic here,
but I figure the question of net congestion data is appropriate.
That "study" seems rather off-base, but explains why the spam patterns
have changed over time....
(I'm one of those silly people that has kept my non-worm spam that makes
it past basic filters since 1999.)
I see a lot of spam in the 2am to 8am EST frame.
Phishing seems to peak Fri-Sat instead, presumably to avoid the weekday
mitigation departments....
The "study" says that "nearly 20 percent of email does not get delivered to
the inbox as intended, largely because it gets mistaken as spam."
That's utter hogwash. My Mail Mailguard statistics this year show that for
me personally, only 0.1% of messages are false positives! Systemwide,
it's only 0.6%!
On the false negative side, I'm seeing 4.2% personally, 2.8% systemwide.
I conclude the parameters and filters are set a bit liberally, allowing
too much spam.
Depends on -
1. How large your network is (how many millions of mailboxes)
2. How you define spam [that study probably defines anything that's
can-spam compliant as non-spam? haven't checked]
My experience with running an anti-spam service is that 20% is probably not far off for non-technical end-users. I might put it closer at 10%, but it's certainly larger than you would expect. First of all, they never check the stuff that gets dumped into the spam folder in their app or service--so the filters don't get fine tuned. Secondly, they ignore legit bounces (heck, gmail flags all bounces as spam). Thirdly, they tend to delete anything from anyone they don't recognize--that particularly includes receipts for stuff they bought online, and subscriptions that they knowingly or unknowingly signed up for.
The main point is that even if they've got a spam filter with a low false positive rate, that doesn't mean all legit mail gets "through".
Speaking of bounces. For the past month or so I've been getting daily spam bounce-backs that are from lists very similar to those that I actually subscribe to (i.e. similar technical content). I'm beginning to wonder if the spammers aren't trying to get through to mailing lists that authenticate based on sender email address.
Somewhere around 85% of all mail attempts to us are summarily rejected because
the source is in some block list or other, resulting in the spam not being
delivered to our user's inboxes as the spammer intended, largely because it
is recognized as spam.
Statistics are what you read into them....
CNN recently reported that 90% of all email on the internet is spam.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/11/27/uk.spam.reut/index.html
David Hester
I posted my rant a while back to save bandwidth;
CNN is behind the times. We passed 90% junk (spam, viruses, bogus virus
warnings, worms, outscatter spam, C/R spam, etc.) a few years ago.
Locally, over the last three months, we've been rejecting > 98% of incoming
traffic with just two reported problems from internal and external users.
And almost all of that rejected traffic TCP-fingerprints as originating
from hosts running Windows.
---Rsk
This account sees something over 10x more spam than genuine traffic, almost all of which is autofiltered.