[MLUG - DISCUSSION] the growing spam problem

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I get so much spam that some of it does leak through and I see the crazy 
things people are advertising.  I recently noticed that one of my 
university email addresses was accounting for the vast majority of my spam 
-- I have been getting about 130 spam messages per day through that 
account.  Once I realized that, I started routing all of those messages to 
a different inbox without spam filtering and I discovered that no more 
than 1-2 out of the 130 messages per day to that account were legitimate. 
That's pretty amazing.

So I talked to our IT guys about it and they said they were getting 1.4 
million messages per month into our system and delivering 200,000 of those 
messages. That is, about 1.2 million detectable spam messages per month, 
or 40,000 per day, are sent to our department's server.  We have maybe 400 
email addresses, so that would be 100 spam messages per day per person.

My worry is that this can continue to get worse.  What's to stop the 
spammers from sending us 1,000 messages per person per day?  Or more?  We 
need to adopt policies that kill these messages with minimal CPU usage, 
preferrably farther out on the perimeter (as they enter umn.edu) so that 
we don't have every division of our University reinventing the wheel.  We 
also need to stop posting professor's email addresses on one long web page 
with "mailto:"; links!  In fact, I think half of the battle is keeping your 
email address from the spambots.  That should be obvious, I guess, but not 
everyone around here is catching on.

Mike

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