My Spam analysis for Dec 24 - 30, 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.
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 analysis of this week's spam shows that various pharmaceuticals, including illicit prescription drugs, male and female enhancement pills and weight loss capsules lead the pack, again, accounting for well over 60% of all incoming spam. All of them have links to websites hosted in China, where the counterfeit drugs are produced. One has to wonder how many people are dying, or ending up in emergency rooms every day, because they foolishly bought spamvertised, counterfeit medicine?
Noticeably reduced, again, this week, were spam for financing (0), lottery scams (0), phishing scams (1), and pump and dump stocks (0). Due to my ongoing procedures I have merged some filters to simplify the reporting process, so the categories shown below may differ from the previous weeks' results.
My current statistics show that spam is now 64% of all my incoming email, for the week of December 24 through 30, 2007. This is up 9% from last week. Without my MailWasher Pro filters identifying and automatically deleting most of this onslaught of spam, email would be essentially useless for me (if I had to sort out the spam manually). Thanks to those custom filters, which I work hard to keep updated, I only have to manually delete a handful of spam messages on a daily basis (which I then classify into filters). The machines sending this deluge of spam are all members of BotNets, with spam relays and remote command and control software surreptitiously installed, mostly by the Storm Worm Trojan. I see many identical spam messages in my statistics (sorted by subject), but sent from different places in the World, all with forged sender names, confirming that this is a World-wide Spam-demic."
MailWasher Pro spam category breakdown for December 24 through 30, 2007.
Blacklisted (by pattern matching): | 28.31% |
---|---|
Elite Herbal Spam: | 4.11% |
RX Spam: | 8.68% |
Male enhancement spam: | 25.58% |
Weight loss pills: | 2.28% |
Postcard Trojan scams: | 3.65% |
HGH filter: | 2.38% |
Known Spam Subjects: | 1.72% |
Viagra and Viagra.com: | 7.31% |
Other filters: | 14.61% |
DNS Blacklists: | 1.37% |
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. Also, beginning this week, I have begun blacklisting particular forged senders that match a pattern. The blacklisted category is quickly rising above all independent spam classifications, proving that my pattern matching is working.
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 less than 1/4% of the spam detections flew under my radar and were classified as DNS Blacklists, for this reporting period (ditto for the learning filter). All other spam was classified and dealt with by my custom filters.