D. J. Bernstein writes:
> Russell Nelson writes:
> > arrange with some Internet
> > provider to put a traffic analyzer somewhere on their backbone,
>
> There's a huge amount of mail that doesn't cross any backbones.
Can that mail truly be called "Internet" mail?
> There's also a huge amount of mail that isn't sent by ISP mail servers:
> for example, deliveries from dedicated ezmlm machines.
I don't think anybody is running vanilla ezmlm if they have more than
one list. Ezmlm doesn't account for bounces across lists. Instead,
if a user is subscribed to N lists, ezmlm has to run through its
bounce algorithm N times.
But in any case if you want a random sample of email that crosses the
Internet, a reasonable way to do it is to randomly sample the email
that crosses the Internet.
Gee, maybe we could get that information via FOIA from the FBI's
Carnivore records? :)
> Furthermore, every ISP is different. An ISP with more experienced users
> will have more communications with UNIX machines.
I think that's lost in the noise. Look at the Unix machines that send
out millions of messages per day, e.g. colonize.com, rediffmail.com,
egroups.com, nbci.com and matchlogic.com. All of these are Unix
machines running qmail, but they all send mail to as many newbies as
experienced users.
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