My Spam analysis for 1st week of September 2007
This article is about current email spam categories and percentages, based on rule sets created for and reported by the anti spam tool - MailWasher Pro.
Anybody who receives email that is not cleared by a challenge-response email provider, is probably receiving more spam now than almost any time before. I know that I am and I am reporting it to SpamCop and using the data I collect to create or update my MailWasher Pro custom spam filters. It is my belief that this huge upswing in the volume of spam over the last two weeks is because it is being sent from computers that are infected with the Storm Worm Trojan and are all members of the same BotNet, but belonging to different peer-to-peer spam relay cells. All summer long this BotNet spewed out tens of millions of spam emails pretending to be ecards, greeting cards, or postcards, with numeric links that led to infected computers that spread the Storm Trojan to the computers that were lured to them. Suddenly, the postcard scams have halted, only to be replaced by huge amounts of spam messages for male enhancement drugs, pump and dump stocks, counterfeit watches, pirated software and loans.
I use MailWasher Pro to screen all of my various incoming POP email accounts, and for which I write my own custom spam filter rules. I give each rule a unique name so I can track the different types of spam I am deleting and reporting. The program has an interesting incoming email statistics window, that includes a pie chart breakdown of the various types of spam that are recognized and dealt with by the software. I thought I would start sharing my spam pie chart results with you all. This is the first installment, which I will try to update during, or at the end of the week. I'll post a new report each week, running from Monday through Sunday.
My current statistics show that spam is 47% of all my incoming email, for the week of September 3 through 9, 2007.
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for Sept 3 through 9, 2007.
| Male enhancement spam: | 24% |
|---|---|
| Pharmaceutical spam: | 20% |
| Counterfeit Watches spam: | 18.5% |
| Pirated software spam: | 13% |
| Casino spam: | 9% |
| Pump & dump stocks: | 2.5% |
| One word subjects: | 1% |
| Numeric IP scams: | 5% |
| Miscellaneous spam: | 6% |
| Bayesian learning filter: | 0% |
| DNS Blacklists: | 1% |
These spam categories and their relative percentages will probably shift a bit each week, as the BotMasters send new spam scripts to the zombie computers under their control. I will try to keep the percentages updated and merge miscellaneous categories as I am able to identify what they were spamvertising.
If you are reading this and wondering what you can do to reduce the huge volumes of spam emails that must be overwhelming your POP client inboxes, I recommend MailWasher Pro (with my downloadable custom filters) as a front-end screener to your POP email program (Outlook, Outlook Express, Microsoft Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc).
Regarding my custom MailWasher Pro spam filters; due to my continuing work of refining these filter rules, their accuracy has increased to the point that only a tad over 1% of the spam detections flew under my radar and was classified as DNS Blacklists, for this reporting period. All other spam was classified and dealt with by my filters.
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