Spam Connections

Over a recent 24-hour period of time, SMTP connections to one box had this breakdown:

61.76% legitimate mail
35.29% unsolicited connections
2.94% uncertain / could not be buggered to find out

That's very nearly two-to-one ham/spam connectivity. Some sources put the average spam/ham ratio in global e-mail trends at about 75% in 2008. For every four messages received, one was legitimate. Now keep in mind I'm looking at just connections from sources I can clearly identify based on personal sending behaviors of those who mail me on a regular basis.

No sooner than I'd posted my "spam's going down" post, I got a very nice but grammatically poor message from a woman who'd found my lost ATM card and paid the expiration fees on it for me. How nice! All I needed to do was send some contact information to DHL in order to reimburse her and get the card returned to me.

Also, her address was from gmail.com but the connection came from Yahoo!.

Yeah, I'm sure that's legit. I trained the message as spam and moved it to the appropriate quarantine folder.

Simply put, these numbers and stats aren't trying to measure spam quality or content, only how often a real mail server (even one owned by Google or Yahoo) tries to send me garbage instead of an infected PC on a home network somewhere. Those numbers are going down. This could just as legitimately occur if spam levels remain constant and spammers just figured out how to use "real" channels: Hotmail, Yahoo!, Google, and such.

But that doesn't seem to be what's happening. In any event, it bears a little more observation that inboxes are trending cleaner and volumes are relatively down from where they were a year or more ago.