Daryl C. W. O’Shea: Lazy Network Engineer

November kicks off spam volume increase again

December 31st, 2007

As I, and probably anyone with a brain, suspected, the start of November brought the start of increasing spam volumes yet again. I suspect that the increasing volume of spam being sent will again reach a plateau (in comparison to the current rapid growth) around March after which it’ll increase slowly all the way throughout October. November will, again, kick off the annual spam volume increase season again.

Below is a chart of attempted spam message delivery to my personal domains throughout the last few months. The number for each week represents the number of messages in my rolling 60 day corpus at that time. I’ve gone from a weekly increase of 3% in the 60 day rolling corpus to a weekly 10% increase. The numbers are a little weird to look at given that they’re a measure of a 60 day rolling corpus, but that doesn’t really matter as they’re meaningless anyway (don’t tell that to the “few” spam filtering companies that feel compelled to remind us that 183% or so of the mail they process is spam)… numbers from domain to domain will vary wildly. The bottom line, though, is that spam volumes are definitely increasing and that if you recall previous years there is a pattern to it.

Entry Filed under: Email