Does Spam Really Hurt Anyone?

I’m very very attached to my old RS/6000 Mod­el 250. It’s the first ever pro­duc­tion machine to run on a Pow­er­PC chip, a 601 scream­ing at 66 mega­hertz. IBM beat Apple to mar­ket with these work­sta­tions by about four months. I have the orig­i­nal press release from when they announced the roll­out, and at the time I want­ed one very bad­ly. At the time I was 23 years old, and a ten-to-twen­ty thou­sand dol­lar work­sta­tion was a bit out of my earn­ing power.

As a mat­ter of fact, a ten thou­sand dol­lar work­sta­tion is still out of my earn­ing pow­er, but the years have been kind to the price of used RS/6000s. I bought mine a few years ago on eBay for $350 and spent anoth­er $50 get­ting the install media for AIX 4.3.3 from IBM.

The Mod­el 250 was mar­ket­ed as a pow­er­ful graph­ics work­sta­tion. IBM was tout­ing their new ver­sion of AIX/windows and a 3‑D accel­er­at­ed graph­ics card for advanced visu­al­iza­tion. Of course, I have no illu­sions that a 66mHz proces­sor is suf­fi­cient to run even the sim­plest of todays graph­i­cal appli­ca­tions, I think that there’s no rea­son not to keep it run­ning in an area that should­n’t require too much pro­cess­ing power.

Like, for exam­ple, email. Run­ning a few low-vol­ume mail­ing lists means mov­ing only, what, a few dozen or maybe as many as a few hun­dred small textfiles around each day. Even keep­ing a few ssh ses­sions open to read mail on the serv­er should be no problem.

Trou­ble is, it’s not just mov­ing a few hun­dred small textfiles around. Hav­ing an inter­net domain means hav­ing spam­mers send mail to every dic­tio­nary word and every name @yourdomain.com. Every hour, I’m del­uged with unso­licit­ed com­mer­cial email.

It’s not just the vol­ume, of course. In order to get rid of all that email, each one has to be checked and flagged as spam and piped to /dev/null or a legit­i­mate mail­box depend­ing on the results of the fil­ter. Even dae­mo­nized, this takes up a lot more CPU pow­er than just mov­ing a file from place to place.

Some time ago I moved from Send­mail to Post­fix in a des­per­ate attempt to stem the crash­es my sys­tem was hav­ing as the proces­sor got over­worked and the mem­o­ry got filled. The OS was killing process­es just to keep itself afloat. For­tu­nate­ly, dae­mo­niz­ing Spa­mAs­sas­sin and mov­ing to Post­fix togeth­er reduced the load to an accept­able level.

Today I’m upgrad­ing to Post­fix 2.1 so that I can take advan­tage of some of the mailserver’s built-in spam-com­bat­ing fea­tures. I’d like to stop accept­ing email entire­ly from domains and IP address­es that have proven them­selves to be bad cit­i­zens and no longer either take up my band­width down­load­ing their junk or spend my CPU cycles exam­in­ing the con­tent. The old ver­sion of Post­fix could­n’t han­dle that as easily.

Now this is an old sys­tem, and Post­fix 2.1 has been com­pil­ing from source for the last 90 min­utes at least. Who knows how much longer it will take, but once again, here’s more time that I have to spend watch­ing and work­ing and fig­ur­ing and nurs­ing my grudge.

Here’s the thing: I’m just one guy. Sure, I’ve let friends use my serv­er for their email, and I’ve got a cou­ple of small mail­ing lists, so I prob­a­bly deal with more email traf­fic than your aver­age joe, but still not all that much. I’m per­son­al­ly faced with choic­es like take more extreme mea­sures in soft­ware or else replace my hard­ware with new­er, faster, hard­ware. It all takes a sub­stan­tial invest­ment in time and a not-incon­se­quen­tial invest­ment of mon­ey in the case of putting new hard­ware to work. I’ve already put a bunch of mon­ey into new hard dri­ves, mem­o­ry, and back­up sys­tems that would­n’t have been as crit­i­cal with­out the con­stant assault my under­pow­ered sys­tem has under­gone over the past few years.

Think about it. There are those who want you to think that spam is just a prob­lem of hit­ting the delete but­ton once in a while. But if it means that a $10,000 work­sta­tion is obso­lete in five years instead of ten, what does that mean? That means that the cost per per­son is con­ser­v­a­tive­ly $1000 per year, with­out even fig­ur­ing the time it takes to hit the delete button.

Hoo boy. Ran out of room on the filesys­tem while com­pil­ing. Guess it’s time for me to go back to it.