Daily Cup of Tech

It has now been ten days since the beginning of The Spambox Experiment and I thought that I would provide you with a bit of an update.

It only took one day for the first piece of spam to find its way into my inbox. A wonderful offer from one Mr. Tanzo offering me a wonderful offer to give me a portion of the money that he needs to get out of his country if I am willing to give him my bank account information so that he can borrow it for a while!

As you can see from this graph, there hasn’t been a massive deluge of e-mail coming into this e-mail box.  In fact, it even looks like some of the spammers took some time off for Easter!  I always suspected they were a religious bunch! (Not really!)

But, there seems to have been a bit of a spike on April 15th.  When I looked at these e-mails, they were all in French.  It seems like someone decided to sign this e-mail address up for a couple of newsletters and they were getting sent to me for confirmation.

I also thought that it would be interesting to see what domain names the e-mails were coming from.  This was the result:

Not surprising to see some Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts in there but it is obvious that spammers are using real e-mail addresses as well from real domains.

I also checked into the type of spam that I was receiving.  It broke up into three very clear categories:

I think that it will be interesting to see how these graphs continue to evolve over time.  I think the newsletter things is a bit of an anomoly and will very quickly become a very small and statistically insignificant amount.

I also think that we are going to see the majority of the sending domains to fall into the free w-mail account status (Gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.).

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

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