Subject: Re: OT GCI E-Mail
gaijin@gci.net
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 00:03:25 AKDT
On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Greg Jetter wrote:
>
> On Tuesday April 29 2003 11:17 am, Adam Elkins wrote:
> > Is anyone eles getting slammed with Viagira spam? I get about 10 a day =
> now,
> > time to filter...
> >
> > Adam
> >
> > ---------
> > To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
> > with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
>
> yes me as well it seem that GCI has been selling e-mail addresses to=20
> spammers , or so=20
> I've heard , when I've recieved then it has been as one of many =20
> recipenants in the to: header all ending with @gci.net. I don't know w=
> hat=20
> to do besides setting up a filter. Since GCI spends the majority of thei=
> r=20
> time rebooting , or fixing problems (my e-mail account has been down fo=
> r=20
> days at a time) I suppose the next thing is to report them to spam cop.
>
> Greg
I didn't see an emoticon, so I am forced to conclude you are not kidding.
Calculate the unit price on an email address @ $30/million, and multiply
that by the estimated number of customers [1], and voila, GCI's estimate
price point: About $2.50 per copy of the list sold.
Contrast that with the costs of employee time, servers, support contracts
with software providers, circuits, and the costs of transit to their
upstreams, and explain to me how GCI will make money on that deal.
Or, we can look at the simple explanation: a spammer buys a list, or
performs an address harvesting attack to obtain his list, and then
proceeds to send out his bulk mail. Chances are his software will be
written to maximize the number of recipients, and minimize the transmit
time. So, instead of sending out 1 unique message per recipient
increasing the amount of data sent (1 set of headers for 1 recipient, or 1
set of headers for many recipients), the software will probably send to as
many recipients as the server will accept per message, and allows the
receiving server to perform the work of generating the copies for the
recipients.
Your logic seems to fail under scrutiny, Mr. Jetter.
With regards to your "solution" - have you checked the header of the
sent message (s)? Did the originating IP's come from GCI networks? Did
you contact their security team and say "Hey, this spam came from your
network!"?
My guess is no.
Insert Occam's Razor here.
--[1] A (very) quick search of Google shows that you can get by email lists about $30 / million, give or take. There aren't that many people in the state - closer to 634,000 and about 236,000 housing units [2], according to the cencsus. Figure about 80% of the homes in the state have internet access (IIRC, I'd have to dig up a citation), leaving about 188,000 homes with residential internet. Figure GCI has about 45% of the market (45% for ACS, and 10% for the other players) as a guess, giving you about 85000 residential customer addresses that GCI serves.
[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/02000.html
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Wed Apr 30 2003 - 00:03:32 AKDT