Spam Analysis - A Mini Thesis

[Phillip McGree]

Hiya all,

I actually wrote all this for another list, but figured that others would be interested.

Over the last 12 months I've been keeping all the spam that I receive.   I figured that instead of deleting them all one by one I'd put them all aside in a separate mailbox and see what trends and patterns I could identify, thus working out some ways to reduce the amount of spam that I get.

Of the 2733 spams (ie 23.16 meg)  I have analysed tonight, 1287 (ie 47.1%) have been sent to phill at iinet.com.au, which is really, really, really interesting because I haven't used that address in more than four years.  

This spam that I have been analysing tonight was almost all received in the last 12 months, which would calculate out to about 7.5 per day, or 52.6 per week.  This equates to 60.3 kilobytes per day, or 423.5 kilobytes per week.  You can now see why I wanted to investigate further.

Meanwhile, an Australian spammer, Wayne Mansfield (ie Which Company, T3 Marketing, various other names) sent me 227 email messages (8.3%).  Mansfield makes sure that I get his spams these days by sending each one to me up to six times each (ie different addresses using my domain name).  I can confirm that his web spiders (ie software that searches the internet for email addresses) are bloody efficient, because once I've put a (traceable) email address on a web site, he's spamming it within weeks.  Another interesting fact about Mansfield's spams is that although he "only" managed to score 8.3% of the number of spams, he did aspire to scoring 6513k (ie 29.6 - 6.5 meg!) when it came to the size/kilobyte volume of his contributions.  The man obviously loves emailing out html.  There is apparently no end in sight of the business practices of this dismal excuse for a human, especially now that his income has increased considerably due to recent (free) publicity in the news media.  Wayne Mansfield profits enormously from his spamming.

My personal domain name (phil.net.au) received a total of 886 spams (32.5%), the vast majority of them going to phil at phil.net.au (so unfortunately I can't trace why I'm getting them).  Whenever I sign up for an email list, web site, newsletter, etc, I always put item_name at phil.net.au so that if that place passes on my address to a spammer then I could track it down.  I've got dozens and dozens of email addresses like that all over the place and have so far managed to identify only a single place that has passed on my address, disproving my suspicion that staff of internet related companies would secretly sell email lists to spammers.  That particular bloke got a nasty phone call that scared the crap of him, because I knew where he'd gotten the address from (ie it was a breach of the Privacy Act, and the address was illegally stolen from an auctioneer's database).  

After reading some time ago an article about a research study that confirmed that unsubscribing to spam actually was semi effective, I have been experimenting with this and have so far found this to be true.  Organisations such as RB Express, Amazing Deals Club, CrushLink, etc, that mass spam regularly have ceased spam when requested.  I am going to try putting some traceable email addresses into their unsubscribe web sites and see if they get passed along to anywhere else.  However, I am careful to only unsubscribe if I have received numerous email from a company, and don't take seriously the unsubscribe details for the individual once-only spams that make up the vast majority.

I still don't have any idea why my phil at phil.net.au address suddenly gets so much spam these days (ie 753 - 27.6%), but I have strong suspicions of Yahoo, resulting in one specific address being used from now on for all of the 16 YahooGroups lists that I'm on.  It doesn't take a genius to observe that Yahoo's spam prevention methods are a dismal failure, especially compared to before Yahoo's purchase (ie previously was eGroups). You can also bet that plenty of web spiders are searching YahooGroups constantly.

There are spams from several regulars that I could unsubscribe to, but I have chosen not to attempt this.  As the saying goes, "keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer".  I tend not to unsubscribe from Australian spammers, because there's a good chance that I'll be able to track them down and meet them face to face sometime.   

Further reading:
http://www.spews.org
http://winchester.ii.net/spamsuit/home.html
http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au
<http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5531431%255E15306,00.html>



Regards,
Phil






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Sent from the Apple PowerBook G4 of:
Phillip McGree                                     	Web: 	http://www.phil.net.au
Perth, Western Australia			http://chat.iinet.net.au
Mobile Phone: 0418 922 500		
Macs for sale - new and secondhand		http://mac.iinet.net.au