My Spam analysis & filter updates for the week of May 22 - 29, 2011
For two weeks in a row, spam levels have remained lower than usual. Spam for counterfeit watches maintained its lead over imitation Viagra and Cialis, by a ~9% margin. This was followed by the return of weight loss scams, male enhancement scams and various dating and lottery scams and links to .RU domains, all of which had lesser percentages.
The malware in attachments, for botnet installers,reappeared this week, in the form of fake links to Adobe Reader and Skype updates. I pity anybody who was fooled into clicking on those hostile links (they are now botted!). When the botnets lose zombie members from disinfection, their Bot Masters send out new rounds of malware infected attachments and links, to rebuild their armies of spam-bots.
Therefore, spam 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 23% 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 22 - 29, 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:23%; -1% from last week
Number of messages classified as spam: 114
Number classified by my custom spam filters: 99
Number and percentage of spam according to my custom blacklist: 3
Number classified as spam by the Bayesian Learning filter: 0
Number classified as spam according to DNS Blocklists (SpamCop, Spamhaus, etc): 2
Number of spam messages seen, reported to SpamCop & manually deleted: 17
The order of spam categories, according to the highest percentages, is as follows:
Counterfeit Watches: 34.62%
Fake Viagra and Cialis: 25.96%
Other Filters (with small individual percentages): 7.69%
Male Enhancement scams: 5.77%
Weight Loss Scams: 5.77%
Known Spam [From]: 3.85%
My Blacklist: 2.88%
Diploma Spam: 2.88%
Subject contains email address: 2.88%
LACNIC sender: 1.92%
DNS Blacklisted Servers: 1.92%
419 Scams: 1.92%
Subject All Capitals (419 scams): 1.92%
This week I made 2 updates and/or additions to my custom filters:
Known Spam Domains (2x)
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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