Spam and the end of spam
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I had the good fortune to sit in on a presentation by MailChannels. Their evangelist and old time friend of Mine, David Greer, presented both the problem and the potential solution of email spam.
In David’s mind, spam has become warfare. As in warfare, tactics on both sides are ever changing. Today the spammers are winning:
* Estimated 100,000,000 zombie PCs in botnets ready to send spam
* 8,000,000 active zombies at any moment
* 87% of all email traffic is spam
For years I laughed at legislation such as the CAN-SPAM act, which is as toothless as a wino. There are too many spammers, not enough trained cops, and a labyrinth of international regulatory, legal, and jurisdictional obstacles to ever be effective.
For as many years I have said that the only way spam will be reduced is if we can lower the profitability of sending spam. Only when it becomes tough to make a buck sending spam will it start to abate.
Here is where MailChannels comes in. They are in the crowded server-side spam filtering space. They provide a mail transfer agent (MTA) proxy that doesn’t delete any spam at all. But what it does is slow-to-a-crawl any suspected spamming sender, causing the spammer to give up on sending their solicitous email.
Using a number of configurable triggers, their Traffic Control product will hold open a socket connection from a suspected spammer. Since spammers make money by sending millions and millions of emails, they cannot wait on sluggish receiving MTAs, and these spammers will drop connections to slowpoke recipients. Hence the spam does not get through, and the spammer loses money via failed sends. Over time the results of spamming campaigns is reduced, dropping sales of spamming services and margins.
Needless to say more than a few companies would have to implement Traffic Control. But if just a few of the top email hubs (AOL, Comcast, Road Runner, etc.) were to do so, we might well see a number of spammers leave the market and some sense of sanity return to our work lives. Since MailChannels tested and discovered that 78% of spammers drop their connections within 60 seconds, we can estimate how many will go out of business once Traffic Control gets traction.
Finally, through measuring the number and types of publicly accessible MTAs in operation over a period of time, Mail Channels discovered that there is a 20% churn in MTA technology. This is strong evidence that system and email administrators are struggling with the problem daily. Given that other reports claim that spam costs companies about $500/employee/year, it is little wonder — and even more pressure to finish off spammers as soon as possible.
