[Design] [Question] Email addresses and SPAM

[Oren Sreebny]

Mimi and all -

Our experience here at the UW, running email for something greater  
than 50k users, is that, as of last month, 65% of the incoming  
messages are scored by our spam filter (PureMessage) as having a >50%  
chance of being spam.  We're processing more than fifteen spam  
messages per second, on average.

Those figures are somewhat lower than I heard reported by the folks  
who run one of the huge free public web-mail services last month.

- Oren

On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:59 AM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> I have 5 personal email addresses that I never give out to any web  
> services / on-line retailers, with perhaps 3 exceptions...and I  
> basically don't get any SPAM.
>
> 2 of these addresses I've had for a couple of months. 1 of the  
> email addresses (gmail), I've had for a almost 1.5 years? 1 email  
> address I've had for almost 7 years. The last email address, I've  
> had for over 10 years. I know that the 10 year-old email address  
> has been submitted at least 10 times to various websites by  
> friends: nyt.com, evite, networking sites, etc.
>
> I don't have whitelists, blacklists, special filters or anything.  
> Is it just the magic server-side SPAM filters?
>
> I have 2 spammy email addresses (yahoo and hotmail). I get 'spam'  
> from online etailers where I've signed up for accounts using these  
> email addresses. But I don't get much 'unsolicited' spam.
>
> My OSAF email I get tons of spam, even though I've never  
> intentionally handed it out, but it's publicly available through  
> our mailing list archive?
>
> How naive is it to hope that the email addresses we provide for  
> shared collections could escape SPAM the way my personal email  
> addresses seem to have escaped SPAM? (It seems unlikely that users  
> will use their event at osafofficecalendar.esthers.com email address  
> to sign up for accounts on web sites.)
>
> Is ' we don't have resources to implement an effective server-side  
> SPAM solution' an argument for shifting the burden of preventing/ 
> managing SPAM onto the user in the short-term?
>
> What are other people's experiences with email accounts and SPAM?
>
> Mimi
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