Rain City Story

The Spam Offensive

Ok, it looks like maybe I'm not so crazy after all. Excluding the cluster this site resides on, I manage 13 Unix/Linux servers all of which process mail and since the end of September, spam has been going through the roof. I mean through THE ROOF. I am not alone. In a normal day, my Spam Assassin installations catch anywhere from 10,000-20,000 pieces of spam. Though I'm able to keep it out of people's mail boxes, spam has a real cost.

For one, CPU power- it takes a bunch to perform bayesian analysis on each message and drop it into the appropriate bucket. Two, disk space. Most of my customers don't want to see spam but I must leave every message on the server for at least 30 days in case the filter gets overzealous or they think they might have missed something.

Just on this blog alone, I've seen a huge explosion of comment spam. Where I normally get 100 spam messages a day, I'm now getting 350-500. Thank god for Askimet! or this site would have been shuddered long ago.

I wonder what the end game is for this situation as it cannot keep growing at this pace. Something's gotta give...