Sunday, February 29, 2004
Spam: the results are in.....
Of the 84 valid responses to the spam quiz, we get some interesting information:
This means that most people correspond with people they know already, most are subject to appallingly large amounts of junk mail, and yet still need their addresses to be public as there is a not insubstantial amount of 'new' correspondence created each week.
All this has interesting implications for spam filtering systems - I'm still working on the ideas. Incidentally, does anyone know if a Denial of Service (DOS) attack is illegal, or not?
p.s. at least we do get a blog entry for this quite unusual date, too :-)
Of the 84 valid responses to the spam quiz, we get some interesting information:
- 95% of people receive more than 50 emails a week, with the average being over a hundred.
- More than 40% of these messages are spam
- They average 11 messages from new contacts a week (suprisingly high, I feel, but there was a little confusion about the question and so some people may have counted spam messages as from 'new' people) - this is just under 10% of all messages received.
- It's not clear that those with spam filters get less spam: lots of it gets through. It may be that they are more email-active, have had accounts for longer or their address is more widely in the ether, and so get lots of spam attacks anyway, but nevertheless the amounts that they still read are quite high.
- Most send more than 60 emails a week: on average, more are sent than valid ones received, so this sample is a net source of email, not a net sink.
- We send to nearly 10 new people a week (also, a number I'm suspicious of as it's very high. Or maybe I don't make email friends as easily as the people in the survey - or I've been on email so long I've met all the people I can already.
This means that most people correspond with people they know already, most are subject to appallingly large amounts of junk mail, and yet still need their addresses to be public as there is a not insubstantial amount of 'new' correspondence created each week.
All this has interesting implications for spam filtering systems - I'm still working on the ideas. Incidentally, does anyone know if a Denial of Service (DOS) attack is illegal, or not?
p.s. at least we do get a blog entry for this quite unusual date, too :-)
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS