spam numbers and spammers

daily spam

Number of spam mails received on @cobbaut.be. From less than 1000/day in 2008 to +2000/day last month. Luckily Thunderbird puts 99.6 percent of those in the Junk folder.

2008
Oct : 25252
Nov : 28153
Dec : 31573

2009
Jan : 38451
Feb : 33050
Mar : 36850
Apr : 50240
May : 68329

having a .be domain
Now before you say Thunderbird cannot be that good, let me explain my old anti-spam system. With every registration on a website, I used a unique address in the @cobbaut.be domain. This unique name contains where(website), when(date) and reason for giving an email address (usually no_spam_please). All these addresses are easily recognized by Thunderbird and manually added to the Junk filter upon receiving the first spam.

data mining the spam
- Two months ago zattevrienden.be started spamming the 1998 advalvas registration.
- About 8000 monthly spams are sent to my public 2006 slashdot address
- 33072 spams were sent to an address I used once to play a stupid flashbased online game (I played it once!)
- 15163 spams sent to an address used to communicate with one single person only!
- 16751 spams sent to my old usenet registration
- ... let me know if you want me to run grep on my spam collection

gmail solution
Gmail has the excellent feature that lets people mark a mail as spam and takes this 'mark' into account when filtering any Inbox.

For example today vroom.be sent out spam: "Je ontvangt deze mail omdat je tijdens jouw registratie hebt aangegeven op de hoogte te willen worden gehouden door geselecteerde partners van Vroom.be." Utter bullshit of course since I have never been to that website. Thanks to other people marking this as spam, the mail was sent directly to the spam folder!
(no i'm not archiving gmail spam)