Spam Levels Drop

Written 13/11/08

This story on the BBC news web site caught our eye this morning. It claimed that junk mail levels had dropped by 70% since Tuesday 11th November.

"Yeah, right" we thought, another piece of press fluff by some anti-spam company ...

... and then we looked at our spam logs. Over the last six months since we started keeping detailed stats we've had 547,148 spam emails here at The Hug, an average of 2,850 a day. On Tuesday we had 2,509 so a pretty typical day.

And the yesterday we had ... 636. The previous low was 1,796 back in August so this was a huge drop.

Today we've only had 524 and it's already 16:00 so it looks like we've going to have about 800 in the day.

Our software also provides us with a bar graph for the last 48 hours.

Check this out, the vertical axis is spams received and there's one bar per hour.

Between 20:00 and 21:00 on Tuesday 11th it suddenly falls off. So the story turns out to be true: they really have taken a lot of spam out of circulation so that's a major coup.

It won't last mind you, but it's nice while it does.

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