On Spam Levels

There's a lot less spam in the world right now than we've grown accustomed to having. Terry Zink says so. Somewhere around 2008 a major control node in the spamoverse called McColo was forced offline in a hostile act of white hattery. Almost immediately overall spam output dropped to a fraction of their prior levels. Pinocchio's strings had been cut. After about a week the teams who work on making spam cheap and plentiful had built new nodes and learned a valuable lesson about decentralization.

There's been a similar drop in spam levels this summer, though I'm not sure if this is due to a single McColo-type incident or a changing attitude amongst advertisers in how they want to market their knockoff wristwatches and erectile enhancers. The weird thing is that I'm seeing a drop in the amount of unsolicited SMTP traffic in my mail logs. Even the hardcore spammers who never give up on dialing me up every hour on the hour and hoping that I won't 4xx them this time with my spamd-inspired deferral daemon have gone away.

Don't get me wrong, I still get connections. Most are from IPs that don't have an associated PTR record in DNS, and a few are from infected home users with broadband connections in India, but that's about it. Most or all of the old-timers are gone: bots inside of wanadoo.fr, Brasil Telecom, and ISPs in Estonia and Russia are all taking a breather. It's serene and a little unnerving, like the last 60 seconds of Friday the 13th.