Originally posted 3 August 2004 on my own site. Just as true now, if not more so.
First, a bit of history. I've been using my CIOBriefings email account since 1998. However, in 2000 I spoke at a conference and placed my email address in my bio. This started a trickle of email that, four years later, has become a torrent of offers to buy drugs online, refinance my house, and enhance my anatomy.
I get a lot of spam. I'm sure others get more, but I decided to track just how much spam I get. To that end, I spent one week tracking all my emails. I broke them down into these four categories:
- Ham - Good email. This is stuff I want.
- Spam - The emails I don't want, sent out by human scum.
- Viruses - Emails with attached viruses.
- Droppings - I don't know what these are really called. Most viruses and spams send themselves with "from" addresses from the infected computer's address book, so I get a number of bounced messages, messages that I have sent spam, and messages that I have sent viruses. I just classify all these as "droppings."
Within the Spam category, I placed the spams into the following categories:
- Drugs - These were mostly for prescription drugs, but some included herbal alternatives
- Male Enhancement - It was hard to separate these from the "Drugs" category, but I did the best I could. It will be useful to combine this category with Drugs when looking at totals.
- Software - Offers for cheap software, as well as software to snoop on those you trust.
- Porn - Needless to say, some of these subjects cannot be repeated in mixed company.
- Money-making Opportunities - This included "hot stock tips" as well as ways to fire your boss and make all your money on eBay.
- Mortgages - Offers to refinance or obtain a new mortgage.
- Degrees/Diplomas - Offers to obtain degrees based on "life experience."
- Casino Offers - Usually offers to get "free money" for signing up with a casino.
- Other - All others. Some were unidentifiable without first downloading images, which I did not do. Others included genuine reproduction Rolex watches, cable descramblers, and phishing schemes.
In exactly one week, I received the following email traffic:
- Total Messages: 3280
- Ham: 178
- Spam: 2246
- Viruses: 574
- Droppings: 282
The spam broke down as follows:
- Drugs: 964 (42.92%)
- Male Enhancement: 117 (5.21%)
- Software: 195 (8.68%)
- Porn: 101 (4.5%)
- Money-making: 208 (9.26%)
- Mortgage: 253 (11.26%)
- Degrees: 52 (2.32%)
- Casino: 58 (2.58%)
- Other: 298 (13.3%)
As you can see, the vast majority of the spam was Drugs. Combine that with Male Enhancement and nearly 50% of the spams had to do with Viagra, Lavitra, Xanax, Soma, or some herbal solution to make certain male features larger. Mortgage offers were the next most annoying source of spam, followed closely by money-making opportunities and offers for cheaper software.
So what do I do about this flood of email? I use SpamBayes, a free plug-in for Outlook (that also has a version that works with Outlook Express.) In this week, I received 2246 spam messages. Two spams made it to my inbox (a .089% rate for false negatives.) More importantly, not a single ham was flagged as spam.
This post was originally written long before I became a Microsoft employee. This is in no way the opinion of Microsoft Corporation; it is my opinion only.