Getting spammed by PetitionOnline.com's negligence

[ThreeHeadedMonkey]

It took just over 20 minutes to download them all, but between 4 July 2009 and 4 July 2010, I received 4123 messages, totalling 58 MB of spam in one year. That means that the spam rate has increased to 343.5 messages per month, up from 104.5 in the previous sample period. Also, the size of the spam has increased significantly to 14 KB per message, up from 7.5 KB in the previous sample period.

4123 spam e-mails? Must be some kind of record.

[DOSGuy]

It's almost July 4 again. Any bets on how much spam will be in the PetitionOnline mailbox when I check it?

[DOSGuy]

So, it's July 4 again, and time to check the spam in my PetitionOnline email account!

It took 15 minutes to download them all. This year we saw a slight decrease in spam, with only 3298 emails, or 274.7 emails per month. This represented 80 MB of email, an increase to 24.84 KB per email. This shows an annual trend of spam messages getting about 80% larger each year.

5 were from 31 December 1969, and there is one from 1980, two from 2002, six from 2003, two from 2004, three from 2005, one from 2006, one from 2007, one from 2008, two from 2009, seven from before the last time I checked the mailbox on 4 July 2010, seven from the future in 2011, and one from 2017. 543 had no timestamp or a malformed timestamp, so Thunderbird dated them as NOW (i.e. whatever time during the 15 minutes that Thunderbird downloaded them).

136 of the messages contain an attachment (4%), and 48 had a subject line that started with "Dear petitions", plus 3 that started with "Dear Mr. petitions".

In total, 169 had the word Viagra in the Sender's name (a significant decrease from last year, which suggests that spammers are adapting to spam filters that automatically reject the word "Viagra"), and 194 came from a sender with the word "Pfizer" in the name. A whopping 169 appeared to be coming from my own address.

[ThreeHeadedMonkey]

They call me MISTER Petitions!

[DOSGuy]

It's everyone's favorite day of the year! It's July 4 again, so it's time to check the spam in my PetitionOnline email account!

This year I received 3891 emails, or 324.25 emails per month. Collectively the emails increased to 88.8 MB, but decreased slightly to 22.82 KB per email. Hopefully this is as large as spam emails are going to get, as the trend had been an 80% increase each year.

One email was dated from 2000, one from 2005, two from before the last time I checked the mailbox on 4 July 2011, six from the future in 2012, and one from 2019. This represents a significant decrease in misdated mail. Similarly, only 34 had no timestamp or a malformed timestamp, causing Thunderbird to date them as NOW (i.e. whatever time Thunderbird downloaded them), down from 543 last year.

Worse news is that 208 of the messages contain an attachment (5.3%), up from 136 (4%) last year. This suggests that spam is more likely to contain a virus in 2012 than it did in 2011, though I did not run a virus scan on the attachments. Those 208 emails represented 11.4 MB, or 12.8% of the total size of the 3891 emails.

132 messages were written in Chinese. I haven't been keeping track of this, but it seems to be an increase from last year, suggesting that Chinese spammers are increasingly targeting victims within China.

In total, 110 had the word Viagra in the subject line, but none of them had Viagra in the sender's name, which confirms the trend I noticed last year that spammers expect spam filters to automatically reject messages with "Viagra" in the sender's name.

[MrFlibble]

Heh you can make a significant contribution to the summarized statistics on wolrdwide spam

Seriously BTW, does anyone run such statistics anyway? That could have a practical application I suppose.

Actuually, this reminded me of how Lee Jackson used to release a monthly bulletin called The Hack Report about user-uploaded fake software updates

Google's top result: an authentic Hack Report issue from 1993 ^_^