My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Feb 28 - Mar 6, 2011
After decreasing sharply last week, spam levels have begun to rise again. My statistics reveal a 9% increase from the previous week. The most recent spam runs have been for illegal to import, dangerous prescription drugs, fake brand name watches and various African 419 scams.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 33% 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 Feb 28 - Mar 6, 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: 33%; up 9% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 164
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 146
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 10
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 2
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 13
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Pharmaceuticals and illegal prescription drugs: 40.51%
Counterfeit Watches: 13.92%
Known Spam Domains in links (usually Russian: .RU): 13.29%
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 10.13%
Blacklisted sender names and domains (my blacklist): 6.33%
Male Enhancement scams: 3.80%
Other Filters (with small percentages): 3.16%
Pics (Russian Bride) scam: 2.53%
Dating scams: 1.27%
Nigerian 419 scams: 1.27%
SUBJECT ALL CAPS: 1.27%
LACNIC (South American) spam sender: 1.27%
DNS Blacklist Servers: 1.27%
I made just 1 update to my custom filters:
"Pics" Scam (Russian Brides)
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 (which I refer to as my Judge Dredd, murder, death, kill rules!). You can read all about MailWasher Pro and the filters I write for it, on my MailWasher Pro Custom Filters page.
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