RE: [Asrg] Introduction and another idea

[gep2@terabites.com]

>> ...when you actually look at the spam (and viruses, and worms) 
>going
>through the Net, the *great* majority of it is pernicious (and hard to 
>filter)
>due to various tricks generally exploiting HTML, encoded text, and 
>attachments.

>>It's notable, I think, that very little LEGITIMATE E-mail content (and
>relatively few senders) need to send E-mail containing those types of content.

>> In my case, I would probably enable less than 10-15% of my correspondents to
>send me that type of stuff.
>[..]

> Can ISPs on the list provide some statistics on percentage of legimitate 
email coming in as HTML, attachments, base64, etc. 

I'd like to see such numbers.

A lot depends on whether you're talking about message volume (percentage of 
bytes) or message ratios (percentage of messages, disregarding sizes of 
messages).

There are some skewing factors which also need to be taken into consideration, 
such as the fact that Hotmail and AOL (notably) as well as Microsoft Outlook are 
perversely set by default to send HTML-burdened E-mail, and by and large without 
any good reason for that.  In most cases, it's POSSIBLE to force those services 
to send plain ASCII text E-mails, although many users are clueless regarding 
even the need for that, let alone how to do it.  

But it's fairly safe to say that, once AOL and other such large-volume ISPs and 
software vendors get the religion, the great majority of 
needlessly-HTML-burdened E-mail would vanish from the Net in short order.

It would also be interesting to see what percentage of the attachments that ARE 
sent are of what types (dangrous PIF/EXE/SCR/etc versus safe GIF/JPG/PDF/TXT).

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment!  Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.



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