Is spam starting to decline?
Taking a look at our spam filtering statistics for the University of Washington's main email services, the percentage of our overall email that is spam fell to 36% in February. That is the first time since July of 2003 that it's below 40%.
While it's too early to know if this is a trend or an anomaly, it's one of the few hopeful signs of late.
But before you get too happy, realize that this still means we processed around 10 *million* spam messages last month, out of 28 million total email messages.
Hrm.
What's the change in overall email volume, though? Because it seems to me that overall email volume has increased dramatically with all the virus/worm traffic generated by the bagle/mydoom/netsky variants. Perhaps the percentage decrease could be accounted for by a corresponding increase in virus-related traffic.
Or, to put the question more clearly: what is the raw number of messages in the categories of Spam, Virus, and Ham for the past three months?
It's probably a local feature in the general trend. I've been collecting data on incoming spam to several accounts for a couple of years now, and it still looks to be headed for the outer atmosphere:
http://staff.washington.edu/jimfl/spamplot.gif