monline

After Washington Post handed over the investigation material -that it collected over the last months- to various ISPs, the servers of McColo Corp. were cut off from the internet. Several security firms confirmed that the event resulted in a serious drop of spam-level world-wide.

I use SpamAssassin to filter out most of the junk and I also keep a record (sender, recipient, date, subject, etc.) of all the spam that gets automatically deleted by my filter. I've taken a quick look at my spam stats and there was indeed a huge drop between 11st Nov and 12nd Nov.

My spam filter catches in average 60 spam emails on a single day. Eg. here're the stats for each day in October: 68 66 83 89 70 87 74 76 78 88 65 48 71 65 51 42 44 33 34 46 40 60 63 47 56 58 65 66 57 56 52.

Here're the daily averages for all the months that I've stats for ...

2007:

• September: 32
• October: 40
• November: 40
• December: 42

2008:

• January: 41
• February: 51
• March: 68
• April: 76
• May: 87
• June: 96
• July: 84
• August: 72
• September: 78
• October: 61

Now the stats for November are a quite different story:

• Nov 01: 49
• Nov 02: 54
• Nov 03: 74
• Nov 04: 69
• Nov 05: 64
• Nov 06: 69
• Nov 07: 57
• Nov 08: 52
• Nov 09: 52
• Nov 10: 61
• Nov 11: 59
• Nov 12: 20
• Nov 13: 26
• Nov 14: 33
• Nov 15: 35
• Nov 16: 33
• Nov 17: 35

It's still a lot, but the numbers do not lie. I wish a few more of these spam-nests could be taken down ... Unfortunately spammers are like weed: you take out one and two grow in it's place. I bet it'll not take too long for the spam level to be restored to it's original level.