« RIP | Main | Spam Virus »
May 15, 2004
Spam Stats and Ratios
Sometimes I really enjoy seeing the statistics found about internet usage. One of the quotes I hear regularly is the spam ratio of global email usage (last read at about 40%). While I love my email, I have never been one to receive massive amounts of email on a daily basis. I keep my mailing list membership low, and personal emails go through small waves topping out at most at 40 a day. This morning I awoke to 230 messages of email, 190 of which were spam. My spam ratio is now well above 50%, making email become one of the least useful means of communication for me.
I decided it's time to track this a bit. I enjoy using DCCd as my first line of anti-spam defense. Yes I know SpamAssassin will use it, but I have a fondness to running DCCd locally. Vernon has a nice series of graphs based upon the stats collected from numerous DCCd servers. They don't give much hope for validating email as a viable communication tool. I have begun to start displaying my own stats from DCCd a little while ago. You can find them here. These stats are really for about 6 domains, with only one domain actually reporting (I need to work on that).
Now to figure out if I can get SA to start giving me stats and incorporate those as well.
Posted by Dan at May 15, 2004 11:50 AM
Comments
Just logged on and checked my e-mail: 234 total, 40 from lists, and 184 in SPAM. This is in about a 20 hour period and AFTER SpamAssassin on my server did its work (probably another 100+ spams). Sadly, this is a normal day for me.
Email is getting less and less useful for me, but I don't what to do to raise the S/N ratio.
Posted by: Brian B. at May 15, 2004 08:23 PM
Actually, I'm starting to wonder how much is actually spam, and how much is from the virus du-jour. I should start tracking the number of postmaster bounces that occur for my domain.
Posted by: Dan Kalowsky at May 15, 2004 08:44 PM