Alioth's Journal: So many spammers, so few bullets...

Some observations recently on spam.

Far from Microsoft's declaration that "spam would be a thing of the past", in no small part due to exploited Windows boxes, spam is worse than ever. Over the last three months or so, spam has made two obvious step increases. When I got my new mail server running, my personal email account was receiving around 450 spam messages per day on average. It made two jumps - first to about 600 per day about 6 weeks ago, and a couple of weeks ago, made another surge again to about 800 per day. The peak was reached on Thursday - 977 spam emails in one day to a *single* email address!

The other interesting thing I've noticed: a good deal of the spammers seem to take weekends off. There is a very significant dip in spam on Saturdays and Sundays.

The other thing I'd want to say is what the hell would I do without SpamAssassin, Procmail and Postfix. Thanks to SpamAssassin plus some Procmail rules, on the day I got 977 spam emails, perhaps five or six actually leaked through into my inbox. Procmail makes it easy to push this into a spamtrap on the server, so I never have to download them - but if I suspect a mail may have accidentally ended up there, I can always look in the spam trap. (I have a cron job that deletes the spamtrap daily, otherwise the filesystem would fill in short order).

Looking at how SA is classifying spam, SpamAssassin's heuristics aren't used all that much - today it's usually because the message body has URLs that are on half a dozen DNSBLs, or the Received: is from an address listed in dozens of DNSBLs. Still, it's surprising how many spammers think that sending messages with "viagra" or lots of 419 scam stuff think it'll get through. Probably 30% of the caught spam hits the threshold from heuristics alone. (And additionally, usually appear in half a dozen DNSBLs too). I'm also using just the normal Debian SpamAssassin package, so the Debian packagers have done a good job with the default setup.

Spam increase

[Tet]

That's not bad going. Most people that complain they get a lot of spam really don't. You on the other hand, are getting a reasonable amount. 1000 a day is quite a bit. You're still an amateur, though. Personally, I've found mine has dropped off recently, from a high of 30000+ a day a few months back. Now it's down to probably 10000/day.

Re:

[Alioth]

Good grief, I host a domain for a whole company that collectively gets less spam than that across about 15 accounts!