Milter-greylist

Hi,

> Petar Bogdanovic wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > If milter-greylist scales to high, that may not be the case any longer.
> >
> > SpamAssassin is pretty popular too, but still (after nearly a decade of
> > being freely available on SourceForge) very effective..
> >
> > Petar Bogdanovic
> >
> It's fascinating that milter-greylist still works as well as it 
> does.  It seems like it would be trivial for a spammer to make 
> multiple attempts, and many do.  Do a lot of ips end up on 
> blacklists before they can try again?  It seems like a lot of 
> blacklists are very slow to log new spammers.  For instance I have 
> week old spam whose ips aren't on spamhaus yet.
> 
> But then again I definitely don't understand the economics of spam.  
> I'm guessing that a lot of spammers are themselves victims of scams. 
>  Something like "pay us a hundred bucks, reach millions of 
> customers" or "make millions with internet marketing."  At this 
> point, no products actually get sold via spam, the product is the 
> spam itself.  Just guessing.  If that's the case there may be an 
> actual disincentive to bypass spam filters because you don't want 
> your customers getting shut down very quickly.  Just let them think 
> everything's going fine.
> 
> I guess malware is a different issue, but is anybody still stupid 
> enough to click on a spam link?  I still believe the biggest spam 
> activity targets the actual spammers themselves.

In Australia, Nigerian and other scams total over $32mill a year sent
overseas. I'd shudder to think how many get scammed in Europe and USA, but the
worldwide figure is over $2bill a year. Australia is such a small percentage
of that world-wide figure, but it's still substantial enough for spammers to
continue their operations.

So yes, people click on the spam links and get scammed, and reading an article
earlier last year where a mid-twenties spammer retired a millionaire and
(anonymously) went public, 99% of his earnings was generated from the
_vulnerable_ people in our societies. Once he knew what they were vulnerable
with, he targeted them endlessly.

Those people may seem "stupid" to you, but they could have mental health
problems, uncontrollable addictions, not be in their right mind, etc and
continue to get scammed.

As email providers, it's our responsibility to try and help protect such
people from themselves by stopping the illegal activity of the spam/scam
operators.

Regards,

Michael.