Thursday, September 07, 2006

Final Spam Tally for August

Once again, just for kicks, I decided to record how many spam emails I got each day, for the month of August. I’ve done this before, but this time I decided to look at all of my email accounts. (Well, okay, not all of them; all of my personal accounts. I have one or two accounts for work, as well, that I didn’t bother to record.)

Here were the final totals:



Which look like this:



As you can see, my main account gets a lot more spam than the other accounts. It kind of throws off the graph, so here it is by itself:



And the other accounts:



So what does all of this prove? Well, not much.

One of the things I was wondering about was whether the different accounts would all spike at the same time, or whether it would be random—in other words, if I suddenly get a surge in spam in one account, will the other accounts also get a surge? But the numbers don’t seem to show that. It looks pretty random. Notice that the biggest spike for my main account was on the 14th, when I got 94 spams, which was a pretty average day for the other accounts, but then the next day it dropped down to 59, while two of the other accounts surged a bit.

Since I didn’t discern any noticeable patterns, I doubt I’ll bother recording my spam numbers going forward. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief yet—I’m sure I’ll find some other meaningless aspect of my life to track in Excel!

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