By now, most organizations have deployed some form of "connection management" to reduce spam traffic before it hits their spam filter. The most common technique is connection blocking, often referred to as "reputation filtering."
Did you know that more can be done to reduce spam at the network edge?
Slowing down spam traffic leads to dramatic spam volume reduction
Traffic Control slows down suspicious email senders, letting legitimate email through while causing impatient spammers to give up. Because spammers require rapid, high-volume delivery to make money, they disconnect after being slowed, looking elsewhere for unprotected targets. This is a completely different and more effective way to stop spam than other so-called traffic-shaping systems, which merely ask suspicious senders to retry later.
Traffic Control uses sophisticated analytics working at the network edge to separate legitimate senders from suspicious senders, prioritizing bandwidth and mail server resources for legitimate senders while punishing spammers.
Spammers are Impatient
70-90% of spammers give up before completing message delivery if their connection is substantially slowed down.
MailChannels has conducted extensive research into the behavior of spammers and legitimate email senders. One of our key discoveries has been that spammers are considerably less tolerant of delays in email delivery than legitimate senders.
On analyzing millions of message delivery attempts across our customer sites, we have actually determined that the median spammer waits just five seconds to get a message delivered, whereas more than 60% of legitimate senders wait more than six minutes. These findings were presented at the 2007 MIT Spam Conference, where the audience recognized their significance by awarding our CEO with the "best paper" prize.
Spammers are dramatically less patient than legitimate email senders.
This chart was generated using data from over 1.2 million email delivery attempts at a service provider. The chart shows the median number of seconds for which senders in each group are willing to wait to get a message delivered. The traffic shaping technology built in to Traffic Control allows us to slow down email connections coming from spammers so that they give up on message delivery. Real-world experience has proven that this technique works effectively to mitigate spam traffic.
