The Spam Saga Continues
Zedd, 07/17/03
If you’ve been following CNF for long enough, you may remember a time when I was bitching about all the spam I was getting at this yahoo mail account of mine. I’m not sure if you realized it or not, but I don’t really give a shit how much spam I get there because that is what the account is for. In fact, I’m kind of interested in the kind of spam it gets. Consequently, when I figured out that I could set up filters for the account, I looked through all the spam I was getting and picked words/characters that seemed to pop up a lot in the subject lines of said spam.
Each day, I had to look through the trash before it was deleted and keep track of how many messages were blocked by each filter. I did this until I managed to get 14 days worth of data. I also kept track of how much spam slipped through the filters. Here is a graph of how many messages were blocked/missed by the filters throughout the 14 days of data:
You’ll notice that I missed a few days along the way. Oh well. They don’t really seem to have any rhyme nor reason to when they take out the trash.
Anyway, I think I did a pretty good job with my choices. I’d estimate that I blocked about two thirds of the spam that came to that account during the 14 day period with my 14 filters. There was only one day when the amount of spam that escaped notice even equaled the amount of spam that was filtered out.
I also made a nifty graph of how many messages were blocked by each filter throughout the entire period:
You’ll notice that about 8 of my 14 filters blocked an average of at least one message per day, with “!” blocking over 8 messages per day!!! That was by far the most effective filter.
Finally, here’s a graph of what each filter did each day. I was pretty much just playing around with Excel at this point, so if you don’t like the way this graph looks, well, that’s just too damn bad for you!!!
I’m still getting about 30 spamessages per day at this account, and that’s with all the addresses that I’ve blocked already and whatever the hell filters Yahoo uses before they even get to me. Spam. What a problem!
And I’m spent!