My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of May 29 - June 5, 2011
After two weeks in a row of reduced spam volumes, spam levels have increased again, as anticipated. Spam for imitation Viagra lead counterfeit watches by a ~5% margin. This was followed by weight loss scams promoting the illegal sale of the controlled Schedule 4 drug: Phentermine. Spam for various pharmaceuticals and male enhancement scams had lower proportions than usual. I saw a lot of what appears to be French language spam, which I can't read, followed by fake Adobe and Skype upgrade exploit links and work at home scams.
Spam is still with us, along with security threats contained in scams and exploit email links, so, email protection is still needed as it will get worse again (it always ebbs and flows). MailWasher Pro is the program I use to detect and delete spam. My spam statistics are obtained from the program, showing how effective it is as a spam fighting tool.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 29% of my incoming email. This is according to MailWasher Pro, which I use to screen incoming email before downloading it to my desktop email program (Windows Live Mail). I report any spam messages that make it through my auto-delete filters to SpamCop.
Here are some statistics regarding the spam received and categorized, from May 29 - June 5, 2011. These classifications are based upon my own custom MailWasher spam filters. Most of this spam is automatically deleted by MailWasher Pro and my custom filters. The statistics are obtained from the program's logs.
Statistics Overview
Percentage classified as spam:29%; +6% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 127
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 116
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 4
Number classified as spam by the Bayesian Learning filter: 1
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 5
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 15
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 28.00%
Counterfeit Watches: 23.20%
Weight Loss Scams: 12.80%
Pharmaceuticals: 9.60%
Known Spam [From]: 5.60
Other Filters (with small individual percentages):4.80%
DNS Blacklisted Servers: 4.00%
My Blacklist: 3.20%
Hidden ISO Subject: 2.40%
Exploit Link: 1.60%
Male Enhancement scams: 1.60%
Interact2 spammer: 1.60%
Work At Home scams: 1.60%
This week I made 3 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
(New:) Fake Adobe Reader Link,
Skype Upgrade Scam,
"interact2" Spammer
I made 1 addition to my custom Blacklist:
[email protected]
There were no false positives last week. All filters behaved as intended. Note, that I now publish three types of spam filters for MailWasher Pro. One type is for the latest 2011 series, in xml format, and two are for the previous series 6.x. One of those filters is set for manual deletions and the other for automatic deletions. You can read all about MailWasher Pro and the filters I write for it, on my MailWasher Pro Custom Filters page.
If you are having trouble caused by excess volumes of spam email, and are not using an effective filter, why not try out MailWasher Pro? It sure works for me!
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