Raymond chen, a Microsoft employee has kept every single piece of spam since mid-1997. The results were then put into a graph to show a visual representation of spam and viruses received for the last 6 years.
The chart only shows the mail which made it past the corporate spam filter . There is still a fair amount of spam in this case, as the filters need to make sure no genuine business mail is classed as spam.
http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/16/230388.aspx
Some interesting stats quoted straight from the blog:
Things you can see on the chart:
- Spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.
- Vertical blue lines are “bad spam days”. Vertical red lines are “bad virus days”.
- Horizontal red lines let you watch the lifetime of a particular email virus. (This works only for viruses with a fixed-size payload. Viruses with variable-size payload are smeared vertically.)
- The big red splotch in August 2003 around the 100K mark is the Sobig virus.
- The horizontal line in 2004 that wanders around the 2K mark is the Netsky virus.
- For most of this time, the company policy on spam filtering was not to filter it out at all, because all the filters they tried had too high a false-positive rate. (I.e., they were rejecting too many valid messages as spam.) You can see that in late 2003, the blue dot density diminished considerably. That’s when mail administrators found a filter whose false-positive rate was low enough to be acceptable.
Interesting trends and various explanations posted for the gaps in spam, some mentioning CAN-SPAM but realistically has this made a lot of difference so far?
Good to see MS staff putting their spare time to good use, also judging by these:
Totals: 227.6MB of spam in roughly 19,000 messages. 61.8MB of viruses in roughly 3500 messages.
MS staff dont get enough spam 
This averages at around 260 spam emails per month although these are the mails that have alread bypassed the filter.
No tags