Jeff said:
How much mail volume were they doing? If it's not millions per hour or even millions per day, it's probably not a significant problem in the bigger picture.
I have no idea about that Terra site's overall spam volume (Internet-wide). I can only say that my server was getting over 100 spams per week from them for several months (with intermittent pauses).
...also...
I, personally, would get about 200+ total spams per day if I turned off all filtering on my server. (my e-mail address has been "out there" for years). With my current filtering, I get an average of 1 or 2 spams per day. (thanks in large part to SURBL!!!)
Interestingly, just by coincidence, I did in fact get one of these "path" or "subsite" type of e-mails spams from a Geocities site. I've e-mailed Geocities's abuse dept with the raw contents of the e-mail and a message about it being spam. I'll report back to see how quickly they take care of this one. (I expect GeoCities to do better than some of these other smaller and more marginal players would... so this is not a very typical test).
The contents of the spam are found here: http://www.pvsys.com/geocities.txt
The advertised web site is here: http://www.geocities.com/altosadickeandkom1816/el/
WARNING... this is definitely a pron spam... possibly Child Pron... can't tell for sure whether these girls are 18 yet... not that I spent a lot of time looking :) ...I was just curious whether or not the site was already shut down by the time I received this spam.
Again, this is a very anecdotal test... and a bit off-topic for SURBL... except that much of the whitelisting (which, BTW, I agree with) that we are currently doing with SURBL WILL cause more of this type of spam to "slip through".
Rob McEwen