Spambox Experiment Update
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.
If you found this post useful, why don't you buy me a cup of coffee to show your gratitude?

Everyone hates spam. It wastes your time. It takes up your bandwidth. It annoys us by trying to sell us products we don’t want. And I want to fill my inbox with it!
A you may have read in the past, I have been a big fan of temporary e-mail addresses. These are e-mail addresses that you can enter into a webpage and if they spam the website, who cares because you have already gotten the information that you need and the e-mails that go to the mailbox are automatically dumped after a period of time.
I regularly use Google Apps to handle my e-mail for multiple domains. But, as of January 14th, things have gotten a bit more difficult.
Johnny’s wife appears to have been a bit too helpful:
