Spam: SpamCop Statistics: A Month On

Well, it’s now been a month since I commenced reporting a selection of my spam to Spamcop (see the results of my first week reporting).

My spam levels have been quivering between only about a dozen a day (usually at weekends) to the deluge I got yesterday of around 800 🙁 I tend to report each “unique” message to Spamcop (selected on the criteria of “To:” address and “Subject:” being different from the spam I have in my mailbox at that time – some spammers send around 20 mails to the same address with the same subject: only one of those gets reported).

Ok, a month and a day ago (yep, I should have done this entry yesterday) I purchased 25Mb of “Spamcop reporting” (paying for membership just adds a few fancy things such as ‘past reports’ and ‘amount of spam reported’ – it also removes a few ads and the “parse” time delay). I now have just 10.3Mb left. Yep – in a month, I’ve reported just under 15Mb of spam. My “average usage rate” is 5.53bytes per second or 14.3Mb per month or a massive 174.4Mb per year (that’s an increase of 50.5Mb per year since 3 weeks ago).

At the moment, I seem to be reporting more like 10% of my spam to Spamcop – therefore I receive around 55.3bytes of spam EVERY SECOND: that’s 4.5Mb a day. A month, that’s 136Mb. So – therefore, I receive in the region of 1.63Gb of spam a year.

The good news is that after the well known spammer Alan Ralksy was featured on a Slashdot article (referring to a freep interview) several Slashdot visitors decided to “turn the tables” on him. They’ve signed him up with practically every form of “snail mail” to his home address of 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, Michigan, MI 48322, USA. Of course, the other Slashdotters were happy to hear this 🙂

Ralsky was actually sued by the Verizon company and is barred from sending their customers spam late in October… Ralsky doesn’t, however, seem too happy about people taking photographs of his house – Rich Clark has received some threatening phone calls within 24 hours of taking some quite nice photographs.

Oh – and AOL also won a spam case against the spammer outfit CN Productions and owner Jay Nelson.

Are the tables turning against the spammers after so long? I hope so…