Marc Perkel wrote:
Kelly Jones wrote:
I know that most (90%+) email sent now is spam, but what are the
numbers for people who use spam filtering?
I realize it varies by user, sensitivity to false positives, tools
used, etc, but do people who use spam filtering find that only 10% of
the messages they receive are spam? 25%? 50%? higher?
I'd like something quasi-official if possible, so I can tell my
bosses: according to this report, even with diligent spam filtering,
xx% of the email people receive is still spam. If fewer than xx% of
your email is spam, we're ahead of the curve.
Well, I'm in the spam filtering business and it varies creatly per
domain. I have a few domain that only 1 in 10,000 messages are good.
By those with the worst spam tend to need my services more.
I'm not in the spam filtering business - I just maintain about 40
domains on 10 different servers, and run basic filtering on each. At a
guess (if anything, it'll be a low guess, because I'm not going to
overestimate), I manage to block, delete, or mark approximately 70% of
the spam that attempts to get into my servers.
33,104 emails entered into the server (approximately 2000 a day are
blocked immediately with rblsmtpd - it varies day by day, this last 30
hours it was only 1,600) in the last 17 days. (adding those in, it was
probably about 65,000 spams)
Of those 33104, 22311 were marked or deleted as spam, and another 227
were zapped by ClamAV.
Thus, from the original, we know we've tagged 67% of the incoming email
as spam. If you add in the immediately blocked emails (of which, I've
received zero false positive reports, and zero reports of 'didn't get my
email' - and this company complains CONSTANTLY about any email issues),
then the percentage of emails blocked/marked is 83.9% of total incoming.
Mind you, that means that I'm missing a lot of spam - of those 11,000
emails that were left, probably half to three quarters were spam, but
that's a lot better than they would see if they were with just about any
other mail provider. (most hosting companies are CRAP for filtering).
Bookworm Computing
