Charlie's Diary

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Sat, 02 Nov 2002 Pink stuff, again Back on Wednesday I re-jigged my procmail scripts and spamassassin configuration so that all spam goes into a single mailbox (rather than just dumping some well-known offenders after reporting them to Vipul's Razor -- the "toner" spammer, for example). I can now report that the charlie(at)antipope.org account receives about one third of a megabyte of spam per day. About 20% of this is Korean or Chinese language spam, which isn't readable using my (text mode, UNIX-based) mailer. About another 20% of it is porn spam, and I'm getting maybe one Nigerian 419 scam come-on a day. This is as nothing compared to the old charlie@antipope.demon.co.uk account, which I've had since 1993, and which is now a dedicated spam trap -- any mail sent to me there will go straight into the Vipul's Razor database. I don't read it any more; the positive rate is roughly one piece of email per nine hundred spams. The volume of spam received by the Demon account is roughly the same as for my antipope.org account, suggesting that both of them are well-saturated on the spammer mailing lists. Even though I subscribe to numerous mailing lists, the volume of spam on my main account exceeds the volume of legitimate email -- it exceeds the volume of incoming non-mailing-list mail by an order of magnitude. An interesting observation is that I am now receiving >100Mb of spam per year, to each mail address. Spam is increasing by roughly 40% per year, compounded. If this is the case, then at this point in 2003 I can expect to be receiving around 300Mb/year of spam. With a doubling period of roughly 2 years -- the rate of increase of spam is itself increasing -- I can expect to be up to a gigabye/year of spam by 2005-06 (with maybe 100-200 spams per account per day), and would exceed the current bandwidth limitation on my current colocated server some time in 2012. More worryingly, I maintain and provide POP3 email for a handful of family and friends -- maybe fifteen peope in total. Assuming that they, too, being getting spam (and I know for a fact that four of them have asked me to run spamassassin on their accounts, so this is a fair assumption) then as their names filter out into the spammer mailing lists I can expect to receive and process on the order of 1.5-2Gb of spam during the course of the next year. This volume considerably exceeds the data throughput from this blog, and is getting to within an order of magnitude of the web throughput on antipope.org -- which is frightening, as antipope hosts some rather successful private websites, with monthly hits in the 25-50,000 range. The CPU load incurred by running spamassassin isn't exactly a bundle of fun, either. This is a feeble, elderly machine, and spamassassin is a bit of a resource hog -- especially when it's running several thousand times a day and chews up virtual memory on the order of [a couple of megabytes plus] twice the size of the incoming mail each time. Sooner or later antipope will receive so much spam that its ability to function as a normal server will be impaired. And this is before I get onto the subject of the asshole from Turkey who has been sending out spam -- in Turkish -- with my email address forged as the Sender: address. Last month I was fielding up to ten bounce messages a day. If I find them, they'll be hearing from my lawyer about a little case of defamation that I'll be bringing under Scots law. (First, however, I need to find an interpreter ...!) This brief rant has been brought to you by the Society For Shooting Advertisers and the League Against Information Pollution. [ Discuss spam ] posted at: 12:34 | path: /spam | permanent link to this entry

specials: Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab "Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex Quick links: RSS Feed (Moved!) Who am I? Contact me Buy my books: (FAQ) Missile Gap Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007) The Jennifer Morgue Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006) Glasshouse Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006) The Clan Corporate Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now) Accelerando Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB -- due June 27, 2006) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Free download The Hidden Family Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) The Family Trade Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Iron Sunrise Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) The Atrocity Archives Via Amazon.com (Trade PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (Trade PB) Via Golden Gryphon (HC) Via Amazon.com (HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (HC) Singularity Sky Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.com (US ebook) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Toast Via Amazon.com Via Amazon.co.uk Some webby stuff I'm reading: [ Engadget ] [ Gizmodo ] [ The Memory Hole ] [ Boing!Boing! ] [ Futurismic ] [ Walter Jon Williams ] [ Making Light (TNH) ] [ Crooked Timber ] [ Junius (Chris Bertram) ] [ Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ] [ Bruce Sterling ] [ Ian McDonald ] [ Amygdala (Gary Farber) ] [ Cyborg Democracy ] [ Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ] [ Atrios ] [ The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ] [ This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ] [ Jesus's General ] [ Mick Farren ] [ Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ] [ Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ] [ Tangent Online ] [ Grouse Today ] [ Hacktivismo ] [ Terra Nova ] [ Whatever (John Scalzi) ] [ GNXP ] [ Justine Larbalestier ] [ Yankee Fog ] [ The Law west of Ealing Broadway ] [ Cough the Lot ] [ The Yorkshire Ranter ] [ Newshog ] [ Kung Fu Monkey ] [ S1ngularity ] [ Pagan Prattle ] [ Gwyneth Jones ] [ Calpundit ] [ Lenin's Tomb ] [ Progressive Gold ] [ Kathryn Cramer ] [ Halfway down the Danube ] [ Fistful of Euros ] [ Orcinus ] [ Shrillblog ] [ Steve Gilliard ] [ Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ] [ The Panda's Thumb ] [ Martin Wisse ] [ Kuro5hin ] [ Advogato ] [ Talking Points Memo ] [ The Register ] [ Cryptome ] [ Juan Cole: Informed comment ] [ Global Guerillas (John Robb) ] [ Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ] [ Simon Bisson's Journal ] [ Max Sawicky's weblog ] [ Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ] [ Hitherby Dragons ] [ Counterspin Central ] [ MetaFilter ] [ NTKnow ] [ Encyclopaedia Astronautica ] [ Fafblog ] [ BBC News (Scotland) ] [ Pravda ] [ Meerkat open wire service ] [ Warren Ellis ] [ Brad DeLong ] [ Hullabaloo (Digby) ] [ Jeff Vail ] [ The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ] [ Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ] [ Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ] [ Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ] Older stuff: June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 (I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)

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