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November 12, 2008

The spam-fighting world was abuzz yesterday and today with reports of a major spam source having been cut off entirely from the Internet. Brian Krebs of the Washington Post had much to do with the takedown. You can read all the details here.

Today, Brian says that several spam tracking sources reported a significant drop in spam yesterday, notably cutting off at the hour when the spammer's plug was unceremoniously yanked. These guys deal in such huge volumes that they track spam on almost a per-second basis. If you look at my stats page, however, you'll notice that Tuesday was only slightly less than Monday, and still ahead of all days of the previous week.

My stats are tabulated only on a daily basis, with the cutoff at approximately 0600 GMT. Even so, I would have expected a more substantial drop in yesterday's flow if my spam was coming from the same source that had been axed. I can only surmise that the bulk of spam I receive originates from other sources—sources unaffected by yesterday's takedown.

It seems that whenever a spam kingpin is dethroned, I don't see much in the way of a reduction of crap headed for my email server. My addresses must be on the "wrong" lists out there.

UPDATE (13 November 2008). The stats for the full day of Wednesday showed an uncharacteristic drop of about 25% of spam addressed to me. There was, however, no reduction in the spam addressed to bad or garbled addresses at my domain (many of which have been on the books for years). I'll keep my fingers crossed that this reduction holds for awhile.