At 9:06 -0400 2003/05/06, Dean Brooks wrote:
>Does anyone with a large email site actually implement
>tarpit/teergrubbing?
>
>What do you do when a spammer opens 10 channels to you every 20
>seconds and you keep them open for a while? Your box would basically
>become filled with idle connections, and since Exim uses a forking
>model, it would potentially slow the process table runs due to the
>number of processes. Depends on power of box, obviously, but still
>would seem to be a potential problem.
>
>Since the majority of the world's spam is headed towards larger ISPS
>(who may not be implementing this) does all this talk of delaying
>spammer connections really do anything significant, or does it just
>make the owner of the victim SMTP server feel good about themselves?
>
>I'm sort of playing devils advocate here, but I just dont see this
>as being any significant deterrent to spammers unless the AOLs,
>Hotmails, MSNs of the world are implementing this. After all, that's
>where the majority of spammers want to go to reach the largest part
>of their audience.
>
I personally find tarpitting/teergrubing not an incredibly effective idea.
If machine resources (and partly network bandwidth) are unlimited,
you will receive exactly the same amount of spam, as soon as the
system reaches equilibrium again.
Of course machine resources are not unlimited, but spammers use a
large amount of machines (not their own), and one could also reach
his own resource limits before the spammers do.
Giuliano
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