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.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Spam from bogus IP space

Earlier today (okay, technically yesterday) I came across the concept of bogons, or IP address not officially allocated for use. They even provide a current list of non-routed IP blocks. Curious about the effect of using said list to block potential spam, I setup a test, consisting of 565,012 tuples (we've stepped up testing of the greylist daemon over the past week) previously processed (I'm keeping some extensive logs here), added the 6,803 IP blocks not allocated, and let it rip.

An hour and a half later, I had my answer.

Of 565,012 tuples processed, only 6,117 came from non-allocated IP space.

It's a little over 1%.

I don't think it's worth adding the non-allocated IP space to the greylist daemon. Not that it makes the daemon run slower, it's just that an IP list of that size takes up quite a bit of memory due to the trie structure used to store the table, and for such a small gain, I don't feel it's really worth it.

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