Jeffrey Paul

I run an email server for a handful of users. It’s been around for a little over a decade. About 15,000 emails per day pass through it, for a total of exactly 5,467,191 messages in the year 2009.

Each email is examined by a program called SpamAssassin on the way through. It looks for common traits of spam, giving the message “points” for each individual spammy characteristic identified. The points are tallied and if the message scores 5.0 or higher, it gets a special tag in the subject line before ending up in the user’s mailbox (or forwarded to their “real” email). 6.0 or higher and it gets automatically deleted instead. The idea behind this is that a message that might be legitimate but looks spammy will still be delivered to the end-user (albeit with a tag which they can auto-filter), where stuff that’s pretty clearly spam doesn’t even get a chance to take up disk space in their junk folder.

Only 559,299 of the messages for the year, or 10.23%, have a score of 5 or less. That leaves about 4.9 million individual spam messages, on a server that handles the primary email addresses for only about 15 people, or about nine hundred spam per person, every single day of the year. Also note that we’re not catching 100% of the spam, a (very small) percentage of spam that’s sent is clever enough to slip in with scores in the high 4.x range, as we’re not the only ones with access to SpamAssassin.

It’s also worth noting that over four million (the vast majority) of those spam had a score of over 10. They’re not even trying, at that point.

Statistics like this make me sad about humanity. Somebody out there is buying fifth mortgages, penis pills, and fake diplomas to keep this bullshit industry churning away.