I’ve started monitoring SpamAssassin via mrtg. (Google for spam and mrtg. Configuration information is 3rd or 4th on the list.) Turns out that 58% of all the email I have received in December has been spam. And that doesn’t count all the stuff that made it through the filters because it was not quite spammy enough for Spam Assassin, which would probably make it up to the 60% mark. This is really quite shocking. Email is still one of the primary uses of the internet infrustructure, and 60% of that traffic is complete poop.

I found it additionally interesting that my parents, who are normal internet users, and are not paranoid about filling out forms (or at least, not as paranoid as I am) with their real information, get nearly 3 times as much spam as I do.

root@buglet:/var/spool/mail# grep -ic "^to:.*[dad's address]" spam
133
root@buglet:/var/spool/mail# grep -ic "^to:.*[mom's address]" spam
134
root@buglet:/var/spool/mail# grep -ic "^to:.*[my address]" spam
47

That’s just today’s spam, which I’ve been redirecting off into a file for the purpose of stats.

Anyways, the actual graphs are uninteresting, as they chart total messages vs total spam for the month. They will saw-tooth at the beginning of each month when I rotate the log files

http://buglet.rcbowen.com/mrtg/spam_spam.html