[OT]: Charting the history of SPAM

["Kang , Joseph S." <jo...@netex.com>]

I got this off of boingboing.net:

"I [Raymond Chen, Microsoft] have kept every single piece of spam and virus
email since mid-1997. Occasionally, it comes in handy, for example, to add
naïve Bayesian spam filter to my custom-written email filter. And
occasionally I use it to build a chart of spam and virus email.

The following chart plots every single piece of spam and virus email that
arrived at my work email address since April 1997. Blue dots are spam and
red dots are email viruses. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical
axis is size of mail (on a logarithmic scale). Darker dots represent more
messages. (Messages larger than 1MB have been treated as if they were 1MB.)

Note that this chart is not scientific. Only mail which makes it past the
corporate spam and virus filters show up on the chart.

Why does so much spam and virus mail get through the filters? Because
corporate mail filters cannot take the risk of accidentally classifying
valid business email as spam. Consequently, the filters have to make sure to
remove something only if they has extremely high confidence that the message
is unwanted.

Okay, enough dawdling. Let's see the chart. "

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/16/230388.aspx