number of IPs sending spam

[kamaraju]

Is there any way to find out how many unique IPs are currently sending spam? I checked http://www.spamcop.net/spamstats.shtml but could not find any solution there. If it is not possible, it would be a nice thing to have some such statistic. What is your opinion?

thank

raju

[Farelf]

... Is there any way to find out how many unique IPs are currently sending spam? ...

Hi Raju - Yes, I think it would be interesting too and whatever is done to produce the "hall of shame" numbers should be able to produce that statistic as well. While we wait for the powers that be to leap to our bidding and produce this statistic, we can draw an inference from the figures anyway - shown at http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=hoshame. We're looking only at what is reported through SpamCop of course, the "real" figure is going to be much, much more.

So, methodology. At the time of writing, we have 200 "top" IPs sorted in descending order which account for about 5.6% of the total (estimate, not really important). How many make up the remaining 94.4% is the number we want. We are given the total number = 24,937,600. The 200 IPs are in descending order of spam quantity, the first 199 account for most of the 5.6%, the 200th accounts for 3,249 spam and all the (unlisted) others must each produce that many or fewer spam. So the minimum possible number of individual IPs from the figures recorded at this instant in the HOS is (roughly) 199 + 24937600/3249 = 7,874. That is a slightly fudged estimate to avoid the effort of adding anything up but it is indicative. Undoubtedly is underestimates to a considerable degree - you could probably double that number without making the density distribution too outlandish - but it is certainly no less than 7,874.

[Farelf]

And, naturally enough, the figures are somewhat volatile. At this instant, the result would be 199+23194190/2781=8,539

The HOS mentions "For the week ending Thu Jul 13 07:08:09 2006 GMT" however the total volume of IPs reported - 23,194,190 - is more like a monthly volume. A weekly volume as shown at http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamweek is more like 6,238,064 presently (this is "spam submitted" which is presumably a similar basis to that of the HOS which is IPs reported). A mystery.