Microsoft Blogger Tracks 7 Years Of Spam

Found on Internet Week on Friday, 17 September 2004
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Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he's saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997.

Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic.

Actually, the graph is an interesting view, for it visually demonstrates the explosion of spam in 2002, its continued rage in 2003, and finally, in 2004, a bit of a fall-off as enterprise filters and defenses come into play.

"You can see that in late 2003, the blue dot density [which shows spam received] diminished considerably. That's when mail administrators found a filter whose false-positive rate was low enough to be acceptable," Chen wrote.

Stupid spam. The scary thing is not really the spam, but the fact that there are enough idiots out there who fall for it and buy their crap. Some surveys say up to 20% do it. No wonder spam increases; one spammer even filled out my contact form... If you want to educate people, slap every fifth person silly.