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70% Spam

30 November 2003

I’ve been away from my computers this weekend (gasp! must get a powerbook), so when I returned this evening I had a whole bucket load of mail to download. Finger-in-the-air statistics estimates that about 70% was spam, 25% was list mail, 4% was auto-generated notifications (wanted) and 1% was personally addressed to me. We’re talking around 700 emails total – so that makes 7 emails from another human being specifically to me. Sounds about right – but wow. Signal-to-noise of 1:99?

I had a pretty turbulent week last week, so it was good to get away for a couple of days. Amongst other things, on Thursday someone ran into my car and knocked me for six. I managed to get my car patched up, but my neck is still giving me grief. It’s a big bad world out there, kids. Stay indoors if you can.

I’ve got loads of stuff I want to post about this week, but right now I’m tired, in pain and after driving all afternoon see nothing but road when I blink, so I’ll give it a miss. Here’s to a better week.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Eric TF Bat: Sorry to hear you’re getting so few personal emails. I’d send you one myself, but I have nothing to say...

    Ummm...

    Wanna buy some Viagra?

    : Bat :
  2. § Motekye: What sort of filtering do you use? Do you publically display your e-mail address with no measures to make it unreadable by bots?

    Often, using &0064; instead of @ is enough to deter most bots. Otherwise, sorry to hear about the spam - happens to everyone, I guess.

    Also, that’s 1:99.
  3. § Mike: Did you go camping again? Would have been a great weekend for it! :]
  4. § Nathan Pitman: I downloaded a beta of ’SpamNet’ from ’Cloudmark’, that’s seems to do the job pretty well for Outlook Express, blocks most SPAM, and allows you to easily report the ones that get through to the SpamNet server. Neato. :)
  5. § Drew: Motekye - so it is. Corrected. (I said I was tired!)
  6. § Danilo: Your numbers are a little out of wack, I think.

    If 70% was spam, and the other 30% was something that you asked for (25% list mail and 4% auto-response) or that was really sent to you (1%), then wouldn’t your signal to nosie was more like 30:70?
  7. § Drew: Danilo - I was counting lists as noise :-)
  8. § Jesse: Only 70%? I like SpamAssasin so far - but it blocked my aunts emails. Not entirely bad, but the scoring criteria has its issues.

    I am all for a better week than last! Of course starting off a monday with a little snow storm isn’t the greatest, unless you are a Christmas nut ;)
  9. § Brian: I too have been using the Cloudmark solution (XP and Outlook) for about 6 months or so (£1.99 per month) and I have to say it works a treat. OK it still downloads the rubbish BUT it acurately filters the junk to its own folder.
    I scan that folder once a day or so just before deleting the contents - so far I haven’t found anything in there that should have been kept. Highly recommended.
  10. § Paul: Sorry to hear about your ’not as expected’ week Drew. As most people are spouting their spam catching techniques, I figure I should give a plug to Spampal - works a treat as a middleman which labels mail as spam as it goes through it. Has a Bayesian plugin that works _really_ well.
    Here’s to a much better week... ;-)
  11. § Marcus Tucker: I use SpamBayes, a freeware & opensource plugin for Outlook which also uses Bayesian analysis, and have been impressed with the results.

    http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
  12. § aaron wall: Google recently changed its search technology to include a new bayesian spam filter...or so I think.

    Paul Graham wrote a good article on it where he stated his email spam filter system was 99.5% effective with 0 false possitives...eventually spam will be going away.

    http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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