Mark's Notebook


	Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam

Wednesday 16 November 2005, 10:41 pm
Keywords: Computer Topics

My ISP uses SpamAssassin to get rid of fully 1 MB of spam addressed to me every six hours. I figure that on average, a spam email addressed to me has size less than 1K bytes. This means I'm getting about 4000 spam emails per day!

SpamAssassin gets rid of most of my spam, but about 4500 messages per month still get through, which is about 150 messages per day, or about three percent of the spam that gets into my spool.

Our wonderful tech guru Mike has taken steps to reduce my spam. Since we'll be gone a couple of weeks, this is a great chance to evaluate the changes. Without his changes of today, I'd expect to get about 2000 spam emails in my inbox after two weeks away. So we'll see.

Spam was down early in 2005 but has exploded the last couple of months. Here are my figures this year. This is what got past SpamAssassin and onto my computer at home.

2005 January .... 1900 ... 100%
2005 February ... 2400 ... 126%
2005 March ...... 1100 ...  58%
2005 April ...... 1100 ...  58%
2005 May ........ 1700 ...  89%
2005 June ....... 1700 ...  89%
2005 July ....... 1600 ...  84%
2005 August ..... 1800 ...  95%
2005 September .. 2600 ... 136%
2005 October .... 4800 ... 252%
2005 November ... 3100 (so far; anticipate 5700 or 300% for the entire month)

I wish I knew enough Java to draw a chart with this data.

Mark's Notebook

Spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam

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