This is going to be boring, unless you like reading about the rate of SPAM going down. SPAM, as you probably know, is a huge problem. Not only does SPAM usually carry some kind of nefarious offer of discount goods and services, but many times it also includes malware- software to be installed with a malicious intent.
SPAM, it has been estimated, is one of the biggest wastes of time in the corporate world. One report concluded that while on average a normal employee may waste 30 seconds of time per incident of SPAM, an executive may waste up to 30 minutes per SPAM! This is because most executives feel they need to get others involved, or because they try to unsubscribe. Everybody else chalks it up to an artifact of using the Internet, and moves on.
The Washington Post and several other news sources reported yesterday (Nov. 12, 2008) that McColo Corp.- an American company used as a front to send SPAM- was taken offline. Almost instantly, every SPAM scanning service around the world noticed a dramatic drop in SPAM volume. A graph collected by SpamCop.net can be found here. If you view this graph the week of writing, you will notice that the date of Nov. 13, 2008 shows a chart of up to 30 SPAM per second. This is a marked difference from Nov. 7, 2008, which reports over 70 SPAM per second reported.
IronPort, which is one of the world's most used SPAM filtering servers, also collects statistics from each of their devices purchased. These units are spread around the world, so they tend to get some very interesting data! IronPort has released a statement noting that SPAM levels almost instantly dropped to around 1/3rd of their previous rates!
All of this got me wondering what my SPAM graphs would look like. If the true majority of email on the Internet was from this company, I should also notice an immediate drop in quantity. That was my hypothesis.
The graph above shows my company's email volume by number of emails (blue), number of SPAM (pink), and number of virii (red). Finally, the quantity of bytes is shown behind the other columns (green).
As you can see, our company email tends to follow a moderately regular trend. Weekends are particularly low-volume days for business email, as we are closed. But notice how close the Mail and Spam bars are? Weekdays bring the quantity of legitimate email up, but the SPAM rises as well. Either way, theraw numbers show the for the past month, my company has received 268,984 emails from the outside world. Of this number, 207,887 were SPAM. That's an average of around 77.3%! This equates to 4908 Mbytes of data, or roughly a DVD worth of pure, worthless, garbage.
But what about the decrease? Looking at the right-most columns, you will no doubt notice the difference between the SPAM and Mail bars. What are the numbers? Well, for Nov. 12, 2008 I received 2,748 emails at our gateway. These were emails that passed the initial checks I do, which do not appear in the graphs or counts. Of this 2,748 emails, 1,313 were classified as SPAM. That's 47.8% for an entire day's volume! This is incredible! Today is just as good so far, at 46.1% SPAM.
Some other interesting numbers from my system:
Highest quantity Mail:
Oct. 7, 2008 - 6,026
Highest quantity SPAM:
Sept. 15, 2008 - 4,864 (81.9%)
Lowest quantity SPAM:
Nov. 12, 2008 - 1,313 (47.8%)
Highest percentage SPAM:
Sept. 20, 2008 - 93.4% (3,369)
Oct. 11, 2008 - 93.4% (3,560)
Lowest percentage SPAM:
Nov. 12, 2008 - 47.8% (1,313)