At 10:17 AM +0900 2005-04-21, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Is this necessarily true? On some systems (my lists' host, for one), the dominating cost of spam is network bandwidth. Disk I/O and CPU are way behind. So yes, if we can stop spam before we see the content, we win big. But as I understand it, even sendmail milters read the whole message before making a decision. So our costs remain basically the same as long as the spam is caught somewhere in the pipeline.
You can't figure out what is spam and what isn't without scanning the content. You're going to pay that network cost, period. In my experience, the biggest cost is disk I/O operations in processing that message -- which is where sendmail+milter can be a huge win over other solutions which write the message to a temporary file and then pass that on to another program.
Am I missing something? I agree that every list admin should consider what they can do to reject spam as early in the pipeline as possible, but even in the case of counting Spamassassin ****s one might want to configure different lists differently.
The earlier you can make decisions as to whether or not to throw something away, the better. If you have to wait until the message gets to Mailman, you may be limited in terms of what you can do in order to deal with spam. If you can deal with the spam earlier in the process, so much the better.
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