Spammers and the law

Robert Soloway, one of the people crowned with the title “Spam King”, has been released from jail. He was an extremely prolific spammer, generating over 10 trillion messages over the course of his career.
As Mr. Soloway exits jail, another spammer heads to serve his 20 year sentence. Peter Maxson Anyanyueze sent Nigerian 419 spams telling people they could profit from helping him move money around. The scam is that the victim needs to pay small amounts of money, sometimes totalling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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How many people to enforce policy?

I’ve been head down working on a doc for a client and started wondering what the average size of an enforcement team is. This client told me during one of our calls they wanted to be as clean and well respected as another ESP, but was shocked when I told them how large an enforcement and delivery team that ESP maintained.
I know other clients of mine have 6 – 8 people for a very large customer base, and all of them take their job very seriously.
That got me to thinking: what is the average size of a policy and enforcement desk? Does it scale with userbase? Does it scale with the amount of mail you send? Is there a minimum size?
So tell me: how many people are on your policy and enforcement team?

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Still more spam stats

Mailchannels put together another post looking at spam volumes. Related to that, many people are reporting that bot levels are climbing again.

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Light blogging for a while

Sorry for the lack of substantive posts, things seem to have gone completely out of control and I’m not finding a lot of extra cycles to sit down and blog. I’ll try and get some stuff up this week, but I’m also getting ready for MAAWG and the sessions I’m a part of there.
There was an interesting post by Romer over on his personal blog. If you don’t know, Romer helps maintain one of the commercial mail filters. He recently got spammed by one of his vendors and talked about how this is probably not the best idea. Al adds his own take on companies assuming permission. I’ve talked about taking permission in the past but haven’t touched on things like “spamming the guy who runs the filter.”
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, about how many people who run filters for large organizations get spammed regularly. You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that those people do factor in their own personal spam load when adjusting their organizational filters.

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