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2007 Spam Statistics

Another year gone by, another year of spam filtering. The overall spam percentage for 2007 is almost the same as it was in 2006, but the volume has increased.

In 2007 I received 111,095 emails. Of those 87,623 were spam. Between SpamAssassin and procmail 86,206 (98%) of the spam was automatically filtered while I had to manually flag 1,417 emails (about 4 a day). Overall that means 79% of my incoming email in 2007 was spam, which translates to about 240 spam messages a day. Compared to 2006 that is a 16% increase in total incoming email and an 18% increase in spam.

Since I used the same spam filtering techniques for the entire year the graphs look more regular.

I'm at a loss about the dramatic drop off in spam around June.

The trend at the end of the year doesn't look good if it isn't just a seasonal spike.

The peak and valley pattern is due to day of week fluctuations. If I look at the amount of spam I got for the year based on the day of the week each gets about 12,000. The amount of legitimate email varies such that the weekday totals are about 4,000 more than the weekend resulting in the higher percentage of my email being spam.

Tags: spam

Posted by Daniel Rinehart on January 1, 2008 10:28 AM |

Comments

The dip in spam corresponds to summer (starts going down in May, noticeably back up after September), which also corresponds to when school is out, which probably also corresponds to when some zombie networks are missing a lot of machines. That's a guess based upon extrapolation from speculation, but it's what occurred to me when I saw it.

Posted by: John | January 1, 2008 4:03 PM