On 2024-12-09 at 16:43:33 UTC-0500 (Mon, 9 Dec 2024 21:43:33 +0000)
Mark Delany via mailop <q...@zulu.emu.st>
is rumored to have said:
On 09Dec24, John Levine via mailop apparently wrote:
It has been my impression that for many years about 90% of the mail a
system typically
Does anyone have research which describes a "typical" mail system?
No such thing exists. The scale and the nature of mail to a system are
not orthogonal, and the distribution of both is far from normal, so it
is nonsensical to examine a hypothetical mean or median system.
a lot of attempted deliveries on my small MTAs.
Does anyone have research which correlates attempted deliveries with
desired deliveries
and actual deliveries?
I am not aware of any such research which could apply to more than very
narrow classes of email such as B2C bulk marketing or transactional
mail. It doesn't make sense to try to measure that from a receiver
viewpoint.
If a spammer wants to deliver a single piece of content to a recipient
and tries with 3
different sender IPs and 4 different "MAIL FROM" addresses is that 12
attempts for one
desired delivery or one attempt?
Excellent question.
I have one mailbox that I watch which gets 2-3 identical copies of every
spam that makes it past the defensive measures. Sometimes I can see in
logs that there have been additional attempts in the period which have
failed due to IP blocking or content filtering. I do not understand why
spammers think that is worthwhile, but there is no question that they do
it. That spam is almost entirely ads in German for a random assortment
of products, so this seems to be one spamming operation.
I do not see anything like that on my most spammed addresses except for
the occasional duplicate ads for real estate and luxury goods in the
UAE. Again there, it looks like one very stupidly targeted operation.
Here's some numbers on two systems.
On a 20 year old disposable-address-only system which rejects all
invalid delivery
addresses, about 12% of SMTP transactions triggered in a 5xx response.
I don't know how
many of those are redelivery attempts by spammers reacting to 5xx
responses.
On a small sub-domain revivified after 20+ years of non-existance in
the DNS, 100% of
attempted deliveries are accepted of which 100% are spam. Here's the
arrival rate since
revivification on 23Mar2023.
It almost goes without saying that neither of those could be described
as "typical" systems.
[...]
I'd love to see a pattern in this arrival rate, but all I see is
Richard Nixon facing left
with his big nose at May2024 - Rorschach would be proud.
Pareidolia is real :)
So there you have it, 12% of delivery attempts on one system and 100%
of delivery attempts
on another. I believe that reasonably covers the range one can expect
over a decent sample
period.
Right. Depending on what system you look at and how you count, it can be
almost anything.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo@toad.social and many *@billmail.scconsult.com
addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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