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15/10/07 Is the Spam Dam About To Break?
LONDON, UK - A few weeks ago I noticed spam slipping through the gmail filters, I’d get a few in my inbox every day. I hit the [Report Spam] button and gmail seemed to learn of these new intruders pretty quickly. When I noticed my spam box showed how many spam were in it, and the fact that it removed anything >30 days I could now put a spam rate on my last 30 days of mail. I had the idea of building an app about a year to get people to input this number every so often and also a figure for their total mail in that period to get a ratio of spam to mail, but then thought it a very long-winded way to do what gmail should be able to tell us anyway.
What was interesting was I took this idea when I saw the few spam start slipping through and started writing down the numbers manually (Google Doc). Here are my findings:
Date | Spam Per Day | Spam in Gmail Bin
27/08/2007 57 1717
08/09/2007 82 2472
19/09/2007 106 3171
24/09/2007 113 3395
15/10/2007 155 4639
I get about 30-50 non-spam mails a day, and so that’s 235% spam!
It’s not a good sign. When will the dam break?
Tags: gmail
2 Comments
Will the dam break? Is the spam changing (becoming different in some way that it’s classified differently to previous spam) as fast as it’s growing in volume? Is the volume growing at the same speed that data storage and processing power is becoming cheaper? These are a few questions I’d like to see someone smarter than me answer! :-)
What I really want to see is if anyone else is noticing this trend (i.e. 200% increase in 2 months). Or is my address being pimped around on some list of people to spam.
