[ILUG] Slightly OT. The which ISP Question!

[Thomas Bridge]

On 2/20/06, Justin Mason <jm at jmason.org> wrote:

> Thomas Bridge writes:

> > Virus/worm traffic doesn't represent a very high percentage of traffic anyway,

> really?

Really.

It appears to be < 1% of some of the traffic we're carrying - I
suppose I'm probably not including email in that figure, but there's
no way an ISP can distinguish that between that  and ordinary mail
that you're downloading.

> Taken as a percentage of mail traffic, it's very high -- estimates vary
> but a range of between 80-95% seems likely, if you combine spam, virus,
> phish, and blowback mail traffic.

Unless the ISP is providing your email service (which in many cases it
isn't) the correct response to this is tough.

> I can accept that SMTP traffic is minor compared to non-SMTP traffic,
> though, esp. in bandwidth consumption.   I have no figures on that.

When I did some very crude anaylsis about two years ago, SMTP / Mail
traffic was less than 5% of the traffic being downloaded by the users,

Thomas
--
Thomas Bridge
CCIE  #14108