[Dovecot] SSD drives are really fast running Dovecot

[Maarten Bezemer]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Steve wrote:

> Spam does not bump the average mail size considerably. Average spam 
> mails is way smaller then average normal mails. The reason for this is 
> very simple: Spammers need to reach as many end users as possible. And 
> they need to get those mails out as fastest as possible.

Somewhat correct. Due to a lot of spamfilter setups skip messages above a 
certain size, we've seen an increase of such big messages. These affect 
the average quite severely.

An average, however, is only just that: an average. There may not even be 
1 message that has exactly the average size...

When looking at last two weeks worth of spam that didn't come from obvious 
blacklisted sources, I see:
45 messages below 4KB (including quite some miserable failures that forgot 
to include a message body...)
127 messages above 8KB, of which only 14 above 20KB
940 messages between 4KB and 8KB

Yet, the _average_ was well above 8KB, due to a few 500KB+ messages.

So, mean, median, or whatever, it's just lies, damn lies, and statistics.


-- 
Maarten