Spam Table Template

   
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Introduction

I've been analysing the amount of spam I get. It's not hard. After all, I keep copies of all the spam to feed my Bayesian spam filter. (See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html for more about that.) Anyway, it's easy to count how many spam I receive each month, so I can create a table with a bar chart fairly easily. A short Python script, and here's the result. I've also created some Spam Graphs, which are prettier, but they don't get generated automatically.

Results

This graph shows average spam per day, averaged over the month.

%(chart)s

This month ...

%(this_month)s

Here are the counts by day for this month so far, updated as at
  • %(time)s

The last few values of this table are underestimates because some emails are retained for comparison with incoming emails. Hence they haven't yet made it into their final resting place.

And yes, I really do get that many spam emails per day. It's interesting to see how various changes in the world have caused it go go up and down. It was increasing exponentially, but then a botnet or two were taken off-line, and it dropped. Then it went up again, but now it's again in decline.

There are also occasional "spikes" when my domain gets "spoofed", spam emails are sent pretending to come from my domain, and hence I get all the "bounce" messages.

Most annoying.

Comments welcome - if you have anything interesting to say, please let us know ...

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