[Mimedefang] how much spam does the average large company get?

[Stephen L Johnson]

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 15:03, Matt Cramer wrote:
> My management has asked me to make some graphs (blech) showing how good of
> a job we do fighting spam.  I know what we do here - basically by
> eliminating spams with large SpamAss scores, and doing much of the
> sophisticated smtp filtering mimedefang allows, I've gotten our delivered
> but flagged spam level down to about 20%.  Before I started, we were at
> 40%.  That is a good trend that I can show, but I am trying to get an idea
> of what other companies see in terms of spam.  We are Fortune 500ish, with
> about 7000 mail users.
> 
> I know the commercial spam fighting tools' marketing usually claims that
> 40-60% of a large company's mail is spam.  Is that accurate in others
> experience?  Not that I don't trust marketing people, but they might have
> a tendency to inflate that.  Our CEO doesn't tolerate bullshit numbers
> when you present to him, so I'd feel better at defending my claim of
> 40-60% for others with maybe an impartial survey or even some anecdotes
> from listmembers.  My research online found plenty of claims, but all of
> it coming from research from anti-spam vendors.

I can second the 40-60% figure. I'm running a proof of concept test
server, It acts as a front-end server to approx 65 sites. I just tag it,
bag it, and sent it on. It handles 40-50,000 messages a day.

My graphdefang charts shows approx 50-60% of the total mail traffic is
SPAM using a SA minimum score of 5. when I first started the server in
the middle of September, the SPAM was around 40% of the total mail
traffic.

-- 
Stephen L Johnson                       stephen.johnson at mail.state.ar.us
Unix Systems Administrator              sjohnson at monsters.org
Department of Information Systems
State of Arkansas
501-682-4339