My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of Mar 7 - 13, 2011
For the second week in a row, spam levels have risen again. My statistics reveal a 2% increase from the previous week. The most recent spam runs have been for illegal to import, dangerous prescription drugs, followed by fake brand name watches, then Asian Viagra, male enhancement scams, various African 419 lottery scams and a new DHL courier scam carrying a the SpyEye Trojan in an attachment.
This past 7 days, spam for various types of garbage amounted to 35% 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 Mar 7 - 13, 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: 35%; up 2% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 212
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 190
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 4
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 1
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 36
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Pharmaceuticals and illegal prescription drugs: 21.03%
Counterfeit Watches: 21.03%
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 17.95%
Male Enhancement scams: 10.77%
Other Filters (with small percentages): 9.74%
Lottery Scams: 5.13%
Known Spam Domains in links (usually Russian: .RU): 3.59%
Blacklisted sender names and domains (my blacklist): 2.05%
African Sender (419 scams): 2.05%
SUBJECT ALL CAPS (mostly Nigerian scams): 2.05%
LACNIC (South American) spam sender: 2.05%
Known Spam [From]: 2.05%
DNS Blacklist Servers: 0.51%
This week I made 4 updates to my custom filters:
Known Spam [From],
Misspelled Viagra,
Pics Spam,
Russian Bride Scam
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.
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