My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Nov 22 - 28, 2010
Look out Holiday shoppers! Spammers are ramping up their efforts to get some of your hard earned dollars. There is a virtual flood of crap mail deluging email inboxes this week, mostly hawking things like fake Viagra, counterfeit watches, illegal to import prescription drugs and bogus male enlargement herbs and pills.
This past 7 days, spam for these types of garbage amounted to 60% 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 often see the same spam message sent to several of my accounts at the same time. 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 November 22, through 28, 2010. These classifications are based upon my own custom MailWasher spam filters.
Percentage classified as spam: 60%; up 6% from last week Number of messages classified as spam: 479 Number classified by my custom spam filters: 393 Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 58 Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 4 Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 19The order of spam according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Counterfeit watches: 22.42% Fake Viagra and Cialis: 21.98% Illicit pharmaceuticals: 19.34% Blacklisted sender names and domains: 12.75% Male Enhancement scams: 8.57% Known Spam Domains in links (pirated software): 4.40%
Other filters that had some measurable percentages included pump and dump stock scams, fake diplomas, counterfeit goods, numeric links (to Botnetted computers) and bogus loan services.
I made only one addition to my custom filters:
Eastern European Sender
I made these changes to my custom Blacklist:
*penis+@+
en1arge+@+
[email protected]
[email protected]
Take my advise and never reply to spam email, just delete it. Never buy anything that is spamvertised. If you do, you will give your credit or debit card details to hardened criminals. If you purchase illicit controlled drugs from abroad, they are subject to seizure by US Customs. It is against the law to import prescription drugs without a valid prescription issued by a physician who is validly licensed in the USA. Finally, there is no actual Canadian Pharmacy. If you see email purporting to come from Canadian Pharmacy, or any variation of those words, delete it. The non-existent company was conceived by Russian spammers. Any drugs actually shipped come from illicit pharmaceutical knockoff factories in Asia.
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