My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of May 2 - 8, 2011
Following last week's increase, this week's spam levels have decreased measurably. Spam for counterfeit Viagra finally surpassed spam for counterfeit watches, by a huge 16% margin. This was followed by male enhancement scams and various illegal to import prescription drugs . Various scams and pirated software had lesser percentages.
The reduction in last week's spam levels might have been due to spammers holding back, or Bot Masters laying low, to try to avoid the authorities who are trying to track them down and shutter their operations. When the botnets lose zombie members from disinfection, they send out new rounds of malware infected attachments and links, to rebuild their armies of spambots.
Therefore, spam protection is still needed as it will get worse again. 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 27% 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 1 - 8, 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: 27%; -7% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 117
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 108
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 3
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: 17
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 30.63%
Counterfeit Watches: 14.41%
Male Enhancement scams: 9.91%
Pills filter: 9.01%
Other Filters (with small individual percentages): 9.01%
Pharmaceuticals and illegal prescription drugs: 5.41%
Work At Home Scams: 5.41%
Software (pirated): 4.50%
BR, CN, or RU Domains in spam links: 3.60%
My Blacklist: 2.70%
Subject All Capital Letters (Nigerian 419 scams): 2.70%
Counterfeit Goods: 2.70%
This week I made 4 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
Pharmaceuticals [S],
Pump and Dump stock scams,
Work At Home Scam,
Re-enabled the Exploit Link filter
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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