Spam is Up

When my email filtering application is, "maximized" - it shows about 50 intercepted spam per page. I can quickly check how many emails were intercepted on a given day by checking how many times I need to page down before reaching spam captured on the prior day.

For nearly the last 2 years, the level has held steady at around 4 pages of blocked spam each day. This works out to roughly 200 blocked messages. At some point in the last few months, this has spiked up to as many as 8 pages on some days - working out to about 400 spam. That's a 100% increase.

As previously noted, this monitoring is not scientific. There are other possible explanations. It may be specifically my accounts are getting more spam. It also doesn't factor in recent improvements in the filtering technology to stop unwanted email which may be responsible for a few percent of the increase.

The data in question is actually pulled from about a half dozen different accounts. One of them is subject to a large amount of, "opt-in" spam. The other account is mainly on mailing lists generated by spiders crawling the web for email addresses. Both accounts have similar problems, although the email itself differs substantially.

This site has previously attempted to track spam levels by monitoring public resources such as Usenet groups. These efforts were also lacking in scientific protocol and eventually were concluded to be too erratic to be considered trustworthy. The original goal was to determine if the CAN-SPAM act had been effective in reducing the total number of unwanted sent on the internet. While SpamButcher's effort was ultimately less than successful, other monitoring studies did produce more reliable data that indicated the level of spam being sent had not changed measureably.

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