"Perry E. Metzger" wrote: > Today, on the date of the 20th anniversary of the publication of > RFC822, let me say a word or two about spam. > > Many say "oh, quit whining, just delete it." For the "oh quit > whining, just delete it" crowd, let me note this. [tale of Perry's own spam woes deleted] Don't forget the infrastructure stress. Several years back, AOL estimated that about a third of all email they process is spam. (I routed the email from Internet to the Washington DC segment of Fidonet from about 1993 to 2000, and would guesstimate that at least TWO thirds of that email was spam, but that may be an extreme case.) Add to that, that spams tend to be fairly large. Even in just plain text, the MMF and Nigerian scam spams tend to be over 10k. Many of the others are in bloated FrontPage-produced HTML and/or have pictures attached. By contrast, a quick check of my inbox shows almost all of my legitimate personal email received to be under 3k. Making this factor worse, is the practice of relay-rape. AOL may be well-prepared to handle a large load of spam dumped on it, but the web/email/etc. server for, say, Pak's Kimchee Stand over in .kr, almost certainly isn't. It will suffer essentially a DoS attack at best, and quite likely permanent damage. -- David J. Aronson, Software Engineer for hire in Philadelphia area Resume, and other details, online at: http://dja2001.home.att.net Looking for work in Philly? Check out the Yahoo group PhillyJobs.