Spam increased by 35% in the month of November. I know mine sure did. The data is released by spam filtering company IronPort, whose software sucks compared to SpamAssassin, if their installation on UVa’s mail server is any indicator.
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I use SpamAssassin on my commercial email account. About 2/3 of the mail that gets past it is spam these days. On my UVa account, the spam total that reaches my inbox is more like 5-10%. (I also have UVa’s greylisting service turned on, which they’re going to be rolling into the default filtering service pretty soon.)
Wow, what a difference between our two experiences. I have a relatively new UVa account with an address that is published nowhere other than, unfortunately, on UVa’s own bizarrely un-spam-proofed LDAP directory, and I’ve gotten between 9 and 15 pieces of spam to that address each day for the past week. The average looks to be about 11, based on a quick perusal of my Junk box.
What used to be my primary e-mail address (but I’ve stopped using because of too much spam — the address is on a bajillion web pages) is filtered by SpamAssassin. On that I’ve received, in the same period, between 1 and 5 pieces of spam.
It may help that my SpamAssassin installation is on my own server, and is highly tuned to meet my needs. Though I’d like to hope that IronPort would likewise be tuned to my needs, that’s up to ITC, and not me.
I have a domain on Dreamhost that allows me to tweak SpamAssassin settings via a shell account. Part of the problem, though, is that really to figure out the optimal settings for dealing with the spam du jour means spending so much time examining mail headers and reading the SpamAssassin docs that it seems more time-consuming than just deleting the spam that gets through.