Spam down by about a 1/3 in the last week
In the past couple of days my co-worker had commented on how much less spam it appears he’s been getting since the ‘07 new year. So after a quick check I found out he’s not alone. SoftScan claims that spam levels suddenly dropped 30 per cent last week.
Possible reasons sited are a “broken botnet”, as well as the earthquakes in Asia, PCs being replaced with new ones during Christmas or simply being turned off and later breaking. They do however make note that many of these reasons would attribute for such a large dip in spam. They also note that the amount of spam is still alarmingly high, being in the high 80 percentile of all e-mail.
I do think they’re underplaying the PCs being replaced, but I would agree that not all of them were caused by this. Probably several factors including a computer-literate family member visiting a non-computer literate member of the family with a broken computer. Also have to factor in the possibility of getting a second computer and the computer being behind a firewall, where the botnet program only listens on a port and does not “phone home” on its own.
I guess we’ll need to see what happens in the upcoming weeks and months to really determine how much was affected by what factors. But let’s hope it drops even more!