Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam Email Filtering
An article at ENN got me thinking, and deciding to look at our stats (http://www.enn.ie/article/10123837.html)
Reported by IE Internet, they claim Spam is running at 63.3%, based on 34k mailboxes they claim they are scanning mail for.
A quick look at our own systems show the following numbers:
As you can see, we’re seeing clean mail of just 6.7% – indicating Spam, Virus and general ‘junk’ levels of 93.3%
Why the discrepancy? Well, for one, I think we might scan a bit more email, and larger providers who scan even more will no doubt have even more refined numbers.
Spam Filtering costs a lot of money to deliver well, we run HP DL580 servers with 4 physical CPU’s and oodles of RAM to keep up with the effort required to filter all the email, without slowing it down too much (a fine line).
In the last month, we’ve processed just over 75 million mails (generating the percentages in the Pie above). The crazy thing is that we only scan mail for 1,752 domains (as we charge for the service) which is a very very small percentage of the nearly 100k domains we host. While people don’t like spam, few are happy to pay for it’s prevention as a commercial service.