Bay⁴ - w3dt.net

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

E-mail spam, also known as junk e-mail, is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. "UCE" refers specifically to unsolicited commercial e-mail.

E-mail spam has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against spam have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in e-mail. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. Since the cost of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising.

E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of spam through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court. Spam averages 94% of all e-mail sent.

Earlier this year (2009), McAfee calculated that sending, routing, and otherwise dealing with spam eats up a total of 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. An article in guardian.co.uk notes, that's enough to power 2.4 million American homes and, by my math (as the average kw-hr costs about a dollar), a total cost of over $3 billion USD. Oh, and did i mention that this doesn't even take into account money spent on spam filtering software, the loss of productivity due to users spending time deleting spam messages and finding false positives, and losses from people who get caught up in spam-based scams, either purchasing useless or undelivered products or being the victims of a spam-based crime?

Additional insights in McAfee's Carbon Footprint of Spam Report ^{(registration required)} suggest that spam transmission creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year. That's shocking!

Proof from a no-name - Some of you know i work for an Australian ISP named FlexiNet, and am the postmaster of FlexiNet Mail Servers.
In March 2008, FlexiNet mail gateways processed: 8,995,771 messages. (not much when you put it up to the big players like hotmail, and gmail, but 8.9 million messages is still a LOT of mail...) Out of the 8.9 million messages processed 8,144,094 (8.1 million - about 90.5%) were spam messages and on top of that, 181,334mb of bandwidth (approx 177gb) was consumed on spam alone. (For 10k mail boxes this is a LOT of bandwidth wasted on spam)

Ok, so FlexiNet is not a huge ISP like AT&T in the United States, or BT in the United Kingdom, but you can get an idea about the number of messages going through our systems each day, just by the figures shown above and the graph below.

The name bay4 originated from w3dt.net's spam filtering server sitting in bay4, rack4 of the FlexiNet SSC Data Center in QLD, Australia.
The idea behind bay4 is to capture, report, and block spam all at the time the message was received. If everyone

Basically our team at w3dt.net has been super busy developing a dns-blacklist which can be used by commercial isp's/enterprises that can be customized per user. At this current time there are no public listings of our blacklist online, but if you are an ISP, or Large Enterprise wishing to support / try out the bay4 project, feel free to send us a message and get involved in helping fight spam.

Below are email addresses that do not actually exist on w3dt.net at all. The basic idea is that web-spiders that crawl the internet, find these emails, collect the addresses and send spam to them.
Postmasters will then be notified that their servers are sending spam to w3dt.net's bay4 daemon. - Names listed here are 100% randomized, and can be found in our 5-or-more-words.txt file.