I thought readers might enjoy this message that O’Reilly sys admin chief Bob Amen just wrote on our internal mailing list:</p:
“Below is a summary of the incoming email to our gateway mail servers for all domains that we accept email for (there are 57 domains). This summary is for the last 7 days:
Our mail servers accepted 1,438,909 connections, attempting to deliver 1,677,649 messages. We rejected 1,629,900 messages and accepted only 47,749 messages. That’s a ratio of 1:34 accepted to rejected messages! Here is how the message rejections break down:
Bad HELO syntax: 393284
Sending mail server masquerades as our mail server: 126513
Rejected dictionary attacks: 22567
Rejected by SORBS black list: 262967
Rejected by SpamHaus black list: 342495
Rejected by local block list: 5717
Sender verify failed: 4525
Recipient verify failed (bad To: address): 287457
Attempted to relay: 5857
No subject: 176
Bad header syntax: 0
Spam rejected (score => 10): 42069
Viruses/malware rejected: 2575
Bad attachments rejected: 1594
The order that the rules are listed above is the order in which the rules are tested on each message.
I hope you find this interesting. Consider also that this is all done with open source software running on two Linux machines. The MTA is Exim with SpamAssassin used for spam analysis and ClamAV for virus analysis. I spend less than an hour a week maintaining these two systems. That’s a pretty good ROI.
I’m sure you have your own similar (or worse) statistics. What a waste! (And thanks to all the developers and administrators who’ve make this problem much less intrusive to ordinary users, leaving it to people like Bob who have to shovel out the sh*t. Ordinary users still think spam is bad, but they don’t really know just how bad….)