Spam Gone

This story on the BBC news web site caught my eye this morning. It claimed that junk mail levels had dropped by 70% since Tuesday 11th November.

"Yeah, right" I thought, another piece of press fluff by some anti-spam company ...

... and then I looked at our spam logs. Over the last six months since I started keeping detailed stats we've had 547,148 spam emails here at The Hug, an average of 2,850 a day. On Tuesday we had 2,509 so a pretty typical day.

And the yesterday we had ... 636. The previous low was 1,796 back in August so this was a huge drop.

Today we've only had 524 and it's already 16:00 so it looks like we've going to have about 750 in the day.

Our software also provides me with a bar graph for the last 48 hours. Check this out, the vertical axis is spams received and there's one bar per hour.

Spam stats for last two days

Between 20:00 and 21:00 on Tuesday 11th it suddenly falls off. So the story turns out to be true: they really have taken a lot of spam out of circulation so that's a major coup.

It won't last mind you, but it's nice while it does.

Written 13/11/08

Previous comments about this article:

On 05/12/08 at 11:18am Paul wrote:

Well, we had a good few weeks. Total daily spam settled down at around the 1,000 mark after a couple of days but here's the stats for the last five days: 2008-12-04 4,219
2008-12-03 3,404
2008-12-02 2,571
2008-12-01 1,371
2008-11-30 1,051

so it looks like December saw it all start again and for the last two days we've been above our long term average of 2,850 a day.

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