email stats.
Update 24 April 2006: Having proven that 90% of all my email is crap, I realized I haven't updated this in a year and turned off all the automated processes described in this page. It was a nice experiment, but now it's done.
Like many people, I get an obscene amount of spam every day. I’ve taken a lot of steps to make sure that I never see more than one or two a week, but I’m always curious - how much mail do I really get? And how much of it is spam?
Well, now I can answer those questions.
This page displays the output of my mail filtering program, procmail. Procmail routes my inbound mail into separate folders based on a set of rules, the most important of which is to run just about everything through SpamAssassin, a program to identify spam. If SpamAssassin tags an email as spam, Procmail directs it into a folder named spam. Using another program called mailstat, I can see how many messages procmail has moved into each folder. I then set up a cronjob to run mailstat once a night to upload the output of mailstat to my website.
It’s really much simpler than it sounds. Honest!
Below are mailstat statistics for this month to date, for the previous month, and a historical table. A quick legend: /var/spool/mail/brett is my inbox, everything else is a folder name.
Month to date
Updated every 4 hours:
Total Number Folder ----- ------ ------ 6353051 606 /var/spool/mail/brett 3395666 225 junk 347900 190 myia 26995676 2017 spam ----- ------ 37092293 3038
Last month
Updated the first of each month:
Total Number Folder ----- ------ ------ 26311697 765 /var/spool/mail/brett 738299 121 junk 430593 237 myia 30997896 2411 spam ----- ------ 58478485 3534
History
Updated manually:
Date Accounts Inbox News Spam Tech List Grand Total May-04 10 0.3% 246 6.6% 420 11.3% 2818 75.9% 219 5.9% 3713 June-04 13 0.4% 183 5.3% 371 10.7% 2129 61.7% 757 21.9% 3453 July-04 35 0.9% 214 5.8% 346 9.4% 2491 67.8% 587 16.0% 3673 August-04 33 0.9% 232 6.1% 401 10.5% 2975 78.2% 164 4.3% 3805 September-04 27 0.7% 424 11.0% 62 1.6% 2881 74.9% 452 11.8% 3846 October-04 9 0.2% 403 11.6% 416 11.9% 2527 72.6% 127 3.6% 3482 November-04 10 0.3% 360 9.8% 378 10.3% 2755 75.0% 169 4.6% 3672 December-04 13 0.4% 445 13.6% 221 6.8% 2420 74.1% 166 5.1% 3265 January-05 13 0.4% 347 13.2% 296 11.3% 1769 67.5% 196 7.5% 2621 February-05 5 0.1% 206 7.8% 297 11.3% 1967 74.7% 159 6.0% 2634 April-05 4 0.1% 200 10.3% 295 15.3% 1270 65.7% 165 8.5% 1934 Grand Total 172 4.6% 3260 9.0% 3503 9.7% 26002 72.0% 3161 8.8% 36098
Historical data also available as an .xls spreadsheet.
