[Mailman-Users] The economics of spam

[Brad Knowles]

on 12/22/08 11:05 AM, Lindsay Haisley said:

> I was intrigued by your comments on the economics of spam, which
> prompted me to introduce pre-filtering on one of my servers, possibly
> later on both of them.  Where did you get the information, in
> particular, that there's an income flow based on successful SMTP
> delivery?  Any references on the subject will be appreciated.

One place I encountered this subject was at the LISA 2007 conference in 
Dallas.

We had a workshop on spam fighting on Sunday (see 
<http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/workshops.html#spam>), which was 
organized by Chris St. Pierre.  Chris also lead the guru-is-in session 
entitled "Everything You Need to Know about Spam (in 15 Minutes)" (see 
<http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/htgr_files/stpierre.pdf>).

Then there was a talk by Ken Simpson entitled "Using Throttling and 
Traffic Shaping to Combat Botnet Spam" (see 
<http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/tech.html#simpson>), and a 
talk by David Josephsen entitled "Homeless Vikings: BGP Prefix Hijacking 
and the Spam Wars" (see 
<http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa07/tech/tech.html#josephsen>).

The subject of the economics of spam was discussed in each of these 
places, to a greater or lesser degree.


The concept of spamming the postmaster is common enough that it shows up 
quite a lot when you google for it, and it's recognized on wikipedia 
(see the last sentence at 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmaster_(computing)>).

-- 
Brad Knowles
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