Things I Hate - #1
December 13, 2004 | In: Personal, Technology
I fucking hate spam.
As the systems administrator at work, I have spent a significant amount of time throughout my tenure working on ways to keep spam out of our customers’ mailboxes. I’ve spent hours and hours configuring, tweaking, looking at graphs, staring at logs, and reading reports. Lets not forget all of the customer support involved because you just know that someone actually wants to get those stupid newsletters.
I’m actually quite proud of the system I’ve built. I enjoy building systems and making things work, and coming up with elegant solutions to problems, but no system can perfectly fight the spam pandemic. In the end, you’re only able to block most of the shit that enters the system.
Here are some interesting statistics from our mail server for the last 24 hours.
- Rejected by Blacklists & Content Filter: 9,286
- Rejected by Virus Scanner: 159
- Rejections for Other Policy Reasons: 2,313
- Mail Actually Delivered to Customers: 7,832
As you can see, the majority of e-mail hitting our mail server, approximately 66 percent, never actually gets delivered to our customers. I think that’s fucking sad. Don’t you?
