Before we start, we have nothing against the luncheon meat product produced by Hormel foods. That should be spelled in all upper-case, thus: SPAM. Some of us like it, some aren't so keen, but we aren't talking about that here.
We are talking about the flood of unwanted unsolicited commercial email which is swamping the Internet. Just in case you want to know, here is the last few days of spam at our site.
The black line down the middle marks the average. Note that dates are European-style dd/mm/yy. This does not include the mail we recognised as spam in our mailer and "bounced".
Mail arriving from "Open Relays" as listed by ORDB is "bounced".
The second chart shows the mail bounced as coming from open relays, known spammers or mangled user names:
We do have a policy of reporting all spam to the ISP of the sender. Many clearly do nothing about it, but we send it anyway. Much of the reporting is done automatically. We give each ISP a "score" according to how much spam originates with it. Each ISP gets a "point" for each spam. This is decayed exponentially with a half-life of one week. Here is the top 20 as of this moment, showing the percentage of the total current "score" for all spam.
We don't subscribe to any newsletters which aren't directly relevant to our work and interests and we are always careful to say that our address is not to be passed on. We shouldn't have to. If I ask a store to phone me when a particular item is in stock, that isn't an invitation for other stores to phone me when some other unconnected item is in stock. If I let someone borrow my car, I don't expect to have to tell them I don't want anyone else to borrow it.
It is impressive how infrequently spammers update their lists to remove bounced users. Here are the "unknown users" found in the last two weeks. We have never had a december1999 AT xisl.co.uk address and yet this continues in popularity. Other addresses are mis-spellings and people long ago left.
In the fight against spam, We support and provide web services for Euro-CAUCE, who fight spam in Europe. We do hope you'll join them and their sister organisations in other parts of the world.
Back to home page