Nik lives in Essex, UK and works in London as the editor of MacUser magazine. The posts and comments on this site do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions of values of his employers.
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Last February I kept all of the spam that came in to my personal mailbox and did a count up at the end of the week. 241 of them in all. In the time that has gone by since then I’ve convinced myself I’m getting more and morespam all the time, and so I did the same over the last seven days. The total? 405 . That’s just my personal account, coming in through my domain. It doesn’t include my web mail, AOL main or the junk I get sent at work.
Of course, it’s all poorly targetted, and a few quick searches on keywords in the headers throws up some none-too-surprising statistics. In each of the graphs below, the word on the left is the keyword or domain name searched on, and the number on the right is the number of messages containing that word in the appropriate place (ie number of times Yahoo appears in the From: field, Viagra appears in the Subject: field etc)…
Looks like the web mail services are still the top holiday destinations for spammers. A pat on the back for AOL, though, which is well down the list.
No surprise here that most of the spam comes from a .com address - after all, the web mail sites are pretty much all .com, and even for private use it’s the most desirable top level domain. Nice to see that .org, the most ethical of the namespaces send no spam my way at all.
So the graph above shows the emails that didn’t include either Nik, or .nik .nikzone or .nikplus in the To: field, implying that they were sent to a mailing list I am on (without asking to be included). I’m guessing that means I’m on one of those ‘15.6 million email addresses’ lists the spammers are forever trying to hawk around.
A lot of money-related spam, then. Shame most of it is only relevant to American residents.
There was some confusion in the sex-related emails. Some of them wanted me to buy devices to enlarge it, while others said ‘no enlargement exercise needed’. I’m going to leave them to fight that one out among themselves. Competition over who could make me look younger quicker was fairly fierce, too. The options ranged from 10 to 20 years younger in three months.
There were three reminders to buy flowers for Mothers’ Day, except in the UK of course Mothers’ Day was back in March. Nine offers of cheap ink, ten for budget cameras, 15 that talked about American loan rates, and 7 that offered me an American mortgage.
Small and Large appeared in the subject line in equal amounts - six times each - so cancel each other out.
The thing I found most surprising was that I get almost twice as much spam from Yahoo accounts as I do from Hotmail. Perhaps Microsoft is having some success on cracking down on the spammers.
Related posts:
- Spam tally day seven
On the last day of the week-long spam count, the spammers have really surpassed themselves. I had been expecting about 800 messages, taking the total... - Spam tally day five
Today we break the 3,000 message mark on the spam count. 3,274 spams in five days to be precise, of which 847 arrived today. Among... - Spam tally day one
Well, it's about time I took a stock of the spam count again. I do it every year and I reckon an update it in...
2 Responses to “Spam-dram”
Perhaps it’s just because Hotmail is down more often…..?
• Posted at 10:00 am on May 14th, 2003 by Jamie.
Very interesting. I like reading your investagative stuff. On 30 April, I did a mini-survey about spam on my journal, mine was mainly concerning the origins of the stuff. You may like to take a look. As for which webmail is worse, well, I have found it’s the opposite to you. Yahoo is great and Hotmail is just a waste of time. By the way I have both my webmail accounts set up in Outlook so I don’t use them as webmail as such but I can pick up mail via wap when I am out.
• Posted at 1:09 pm on May 10th, 2003 by Kev.