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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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The extent of the spam problem

I read a lot in various newsletters I get about the extent of the spam/virus problem, but nothing drives it home like a snapshot of your own email volume.

My spam provider just launched a new service, a monthly report in PDF format of the actions it has taken over the last 30 days with your email. (SpamSoap isn’t software installed on your own PC to filter out spam. Since I have my own mail server, I route all mail first through SpamSoap, which then forwards on all legit email to my server.)

For the month of October, SpamSoap sent 1% of the email addressed to the holtz.com domain on to me. The rest was either quarantined (13%) or denied altogether (86%). In other words, 99% of the email sent to holtz.com was illegitimate.

If the percentages are eye-opening, consider the numbers. For the month, 832,776 emails were received, but only 10,024 were sent on. The emails broke down like this:

  • Spam detected: 361,456
  • Virus detected: 1,151
  • Attachment violations: 7
  • Content violations: 60,033

For the year to date, the numbers are even more staggering: 26,326,829 spam messages and 54,241 viruses. At this pace, SpamSoap will have blocked more than 30 million spam messages destined for holtz.com by the time New Year’s rolls around.

Astounding.

11/01/08 | 2 Comments | The extent of the spam problem

Comments
  • 1.Wow, Shel. I think it's amazing how much spam you get (or thankfully, DON'T get!) I think I have a pretty strong email spam blocker at work, and gmail does pretty well, too. Akismet does a great job of blocking spam in my Wordpress.com blog. I've checked the Akismet spam queue a couple of times and never seen any legitimate comments held up, so I don't even bother to check anymore. Still, I love seeing how Akismet has protected me from 64,716 spam comments so far.

    By the way, I'm using this comment in one of my SMUG classes (Blogging 117) to show beginning bloggers how they can use comments in other blogs to join the conversation and indirectly attract traffic to their own blogs.

    Lee Aase | November 2008 | Austin, MN

  • 2.Blogs are a conversational medium. As we learned in Blogging 101, a blog is essentially a newspaper. Two major factors that set blogs apart are:

    Anyone can be a publisher, and
    Within reason, every letter to the editor is published.

    I say “withi...

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