Research question: How many legitimate mail sources are out there?

[Matthew Elvey]

Would someone out there please take a stab at answering this question?
Or has it been answered already?

What to I mean by a 'mail source'? Well, in technical terms I'm thinking
someone could say something like:
"Here's info from a large ISP (handling mail for x million customers).
Over a period of ____ it accepted mail from x IP addresses that it
thinks were sending it mostly ham"

I'd be even happier with something like this:
it accepted mail from x TLD Names in the HELO.

I could live with something like: my greylisting server whitelisted x IP
addresses (I'm figure John Levine could give us this number quite
quickly for his a
"several hundred individual mailboxes, a few dozen mailing lists, and
the abuse.net message forwarding system.")

Of course, sometimes several servers send through one IP, or one server
sends through several IPs...

I'm guessing that there are under a million such mail sources. There
are around .1 billion TLD Names*.

This is apropos this thread: SPF Loses Mindshare at
http://www.circleid.com/article.php?id=1157_0_1_0_C/

*http://www.registrarstats.com/zonefile_enlarged.asp (Could be a few
times more more, as this doesn't list ccTLDs...)

[Alan DeKok]

Post by Matthew Elvey
Would someone out there please take a stab at answering this question?
Or has it been answered already?

Yes. http://www.striker.ottawa.on.ca/~aland/spam/

The data covers a significant portion of the Internet.

Post by Matthew Elvey
I'm guessing that there are under a million such mail sources. There
are around .1 billion TLD Names*.

Close. As of a year ago, about 300k IP's.

Alan DeKok.

[Dean Anderson]

Post by Alan DeKok

Post by Matthew Elvey
Would someone out there please take a stab at answering this question?
Or has it been answered already?

Yes. http://www.striker.ottawa.on.ca/~aland/spam/
The data covers a significant portion of the Internet.

Post by Matthew Elvey
I'm guessing that there are under a million such mail sources. There
are around .1 billion TLD Names*.

Close. As of a year ago, about 300k IP's.

Really? 300K "legitimate mail sources"? Worldwide? "legitimate mail
sources": That would include corporate mail servers, right? Gee, I think
there are more than that in the United States. Probably more than that in
Canada, too. Maybe you want to rethink that a bit.

--Dean

[Alan DeKok]

Post by Dean Anderson
Really?

Yes.

Sincerely,

Alan DeKok.

[John Levine]

Post by Matthew Elvey
I could live with something like: my greylisting server whitelisted x
IP addresses (I'm figure John Levine could give us this number quite
quickly for his a "several hundred individual mailboxes, a few dozen
mailing lists, and the abuse.net message forwarding system.")

It's about 22,000 addresses. My fixed greylist covers about 3000 more
addresses in CIDR blocks, of which probably no more than a few hundred
send mail.

I have no idea how this relates to the pattern a larger ISP would see.

R's,
John