Spam: SpamCop Statistics

Well, it’s now been a week since I started using SpamCop in a ‘paid for sense’ to report unsolicited email that I’ve been receiving, and the statistics are quite scary. In a recent deluge of spam, I got 245 messages – of those I report only 16 of them to SpamCop (6.53%): and that’s just about average for me. Exactly a week ago (give or take a few minutes), I “purchased” 25Mb of SpamCop usage, I’ve now only got 22.6Mb left. That means my “average usage rate” is 3.93 bytes/per second or 10.2Mb a month or 123.9Mb a year.

Now, remember that I only report an average of 6% to SpamCop, that means that I get around 65.5bytes of spam per second, 3.83Kb per minute, 230Kb of spam per hour, and 5.53 Mb of spam per day. That’s a lot of crap in my mailbox 🙁 Now to escalate that up to a yearly figure and I receive around 2.02Gb of spam! Sheesh! That’s over 3 CDs full of spam. Take in to account all the bandwidth and storage fees – PLUS my time spent sorting through it all (you could also include the SpamCop reporting fee) and it does add up: so much for the spammers excuse that “you shouldn’t complain as it doesn’t cost you anything”….

Oh yes, and because of an article on Slashdot, I’m now CC’ing most of the reports I send to SpamCop to SpamArchive. I don’t know what they are planning on doing with all the spam that gets sent to submit@spamarchive.org, but at least they’re getting lots of it now 🙂

Now, if I could only get my hands on people like Alan Ralsky and Laura Betterly (two big time spammers) *grr*. If any spammers (or, if you must, “senders of unsolicited commercial or bulk email”) are reading this: I DO NOT buy ANYTHING that has been advertised via these methods and I DO report it to your ISPs. Please stop wasting my time, your time and your ISPs…