Is the spam increase in spamcop statistics meaningful?

[dle]

Hi,

when I look at spamcop stats page, I see a doubling of spam within about a year. (For me personally this is not a problem, as I didn't experience any significant increase.)

Does anyone have a hint wether this is a real increase of spam level or just one of reporting ratio?

Dominik

[rconner]

Does anyone have a hint wether this is a real increase of spam level or just one of reporting ratio?

I think that the accepted wisdom is that spam is constantly increasing, but I'd be reluctant to cite the SpamCop stats as evidence. The number of reports filed through SpamCop is a function strictly of (1) how many SpamCop users there are, and (2) how many of their spams they report.

We can also look at the spam stats kept by commercial anti-spam services. but again these are only dealing with the spams that these services encounter, and this number depends again upon the number of people who sign up to use the services.

In other words, more spams reported could mean more spams sent, but it could also just mean more people bothering to report.

-- rick

On edit: Clarified my point (which I left out of original post).

[Javier]

when I look at spamcop stats page, I see a doubling of spam within about a year. (For me personally this is not a problem, as I didn't experience any significant increase.)

Does anyone have a hint wether this is a real increase of spam level or just one of reporting ratio?

FWIW, in my personal experience the spam hitting my addresses has increased x7 since March 07.

From 300 junk mails in a "bad day", now I'm receiving +2000 daily and counting. Around a 3% of it slips under the SpamAssassin radar and ends in my mailbox and I further "treat" it with MailWasher before download to my system the legit email.

To this date I report all junk that SpamCop quarantines in my 'Held' folder (and the further ones catched by MailWasher as well), but if the trend continues to increase I probably will be obliged to just forgot the 'Held' folder and let it be deleted by SC, as my day only have 24h (and I don't expect to hire someone to report the spam for me).

[agsteele]

I think Rick has been very helpful.

What I can say is that our mail server is now handling more spam than a year ago - significantly more - estimated at a 50% increase.

That spam received now amounts to almost 90% of all mail which arrives at the SMTP stage. But that our careful use of block lists means that much of the spam received is simply dropped and not processed.

A cursory glance at logs shows that a significant amount of the junk that is dropped appears to be dictionary type guesses at Email addresses which fail simply because the address does not exist.

But like Rick I wouldn't quote the SpamCop stats as evidence of an increase.

Andrew