Bill Verity wrote:
> Not really.  Listserv sends out X-Spam jobs to other servers to
 > warn about possible spam ids.  Yesterday I had 69,000 mail files
 > in listserv's output queue.  Over 57,000 were x-spam jobs to other
 > sites.  I moved them all aside so the server could have time to
 > deliver list mail.  I plan to erase them.  Not sure how we got so
 > far behind.  We have been hit pretty hard recently with spams and
 > viruses.
> --

Back in the days when spammers cranked out hundreds, thousands, tens of
thousands of messages with the same return address, the X-SPAM jobs served
a useful purpose. In this day and age, when most spammers seem to be using
products that crank out individual messages to individual recipients with a
different return address on each message, I have to wonder whether the benefit
provided by the X-SPAM communications still outweighs the overhead of handling
them.

Before we migrated our LISTSERV service from a woefully underpowered box, we
discussed the possibility of switching from NETWORKED mode to STANDALONE mode,
just so we could eliminate the overhead of non-distribution jobs from other
servers.

--
Paul Russell
Senior Systems Administrator
University of Notre Dame