June spam

You’ll note that these numbers are far lower than the ones I posted for March. Unfortunately, the reason is not that the spammers are taking the summer off. We should be so lucky. Rather, I changed my strategy.

Instead of trying to prevent the delivery of spam e-mail messages, I just let them try. This way, spammers sending messages to invalid user names get an ‘access denied’ reject error rather than a ‘try again later’ reject error. It seems they do indeed try again later because only two days in March had lower numbers than the highest day in June. Weird but true.

June had a total of 352,757 delivery attempts including just 1,200 non-spam messages. Call it an even 99.66% spam for the month.

As far as the graph goes:

burgundy red is e-mail to invalid users (97.25%)

neon blue is e-mail stopped by greylisting (1.39%)

pink is e-mail from invalid domains (0.89%)

The next smallest item is one-eighth the size of the invalid domain number, and they get smaller from there.