The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Monday, September 27, 2004

The evergrowing spam problem

While I was staying at Hotel Negiyo, I had the chance to talk with Rob, my old roommate—he's a sysadmin there at Negiyo. We chatted for a bit about the server compromises I experienced then drifted towards the new anti-spam measures he helped to implement at Negiyo.

Quite impressive actually. The router sitting in front of the email system is actually one of two that are synchronized; if one goes down the other can immediately take over without dropping an existing TCP connection. The network traffic then goes to one of several load balancers which send the traffic through one of fourty dedicated systems that do nothing but scan the email, looking for signs of spam. It's more of a filter, as these systems then send the traffic on towards the actual email server for actual delivery. As the email filters through the dedicated system(s), it makes a determination if the email is spam or not, and updates a database system with a yea/nay flag that the SMTP server can then query and deal with the spam as the customer would like.

The volume of email they handle just in Boca is staggering—Rob showed me the statistics for the previous day: 15 million pieces of email. Even more impressive (and depressing) is that out of 15 million pieces of email, more than 80% was classified as spam.

Eighty percent!

Out of 15 million emails delivered, over 12 million was nothing more than spam.

Talk about depressing.

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.