[anti-spam-wg@localhost] New spam statistics available 1997-2002

[Paul Wouters <]

Hi,


I have been archiving all my spam since 1997.  I have generated new
statistics which include 2002, and the executive summary is: It still
seems to be growing faster then ever with an almost 500% increase over
the last year :(

In bsolute numbers:

Year  Spams
1997   541
1998   661
1999   598
2000  1230
2001  1629 
2002  7796

combined : http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/spam/all/
xs4all.nl: http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/spam/xsspams/
xtdnet.nl: http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/spam/xtdnet/

Some notes:

- paul@localhost is an active account, paul@localhost has been dorment since 1995.
- There is still a bug in Mail::Graph that causes the xs4all spam to scale badly
  due to some oddness in december 2000. Check xtdnet spam for a better relative
  graph.
- All spam before 1997 in the graphs is really misfiled spam by Mail::Graph
- All BADMIME entries are removed mime codes that crash my webmailfolder
  program. Usually the From or Subject then consists of a mime seperator.
- My xtdnet spam contains much postmaster spam, since many postmaster
  addresses of domains of our clients point to me.
- I was over my mail quota on the xs4all server in july and part of august 
  2002. As a result, mail bounced and the statistics have a gap. Sadly, one
  can extrapolate it perfectly, spammers are so predictable......
- I made an xs4all mail alias "leto" without using it publicly, and it collected 99 spams.
  We can (carefully!) conclude that this might mean xs4all suffered 99 dictionary 
  based spam attacks in 2002. Since I'm publishing this archive as of now, this
  address will ofcourse get poisoned. So I've made a new (four letter) one :)
- xs4all spam still needs to be HTML'ed, corrupt emails with bad mime cause wmf to 
  segfault.
- In 2002 I got a handful of threats for legal action, though no one actually sued
  me.after I did not comply to their removal demands. One spam got anonymised after 
  a polite email.

The entire archive is published at http://www.xtdnet.nl/paul/spam/

Paul