Ryan's Journal

Starting in 2005 and continuing into subsequent years, I went to the trouble of gathering and visualizing what was happening in my mail universe. After getting to a point where I can now stream data into an online graph, I got less interested. I found out what I needed to know to configure the system properly. Spam management has reached a nearly optimal point for me. I see it rarely, I need to pull out false positives from the garbage even more rarely, not anywhere nearly enough to invest more energy into infrastructure. I'm sure the spam world will continue to evolve and cost us overmuch in resource expenditures, and I'm glad there are folks out there who still want to fight this battle, but because it now consumes so little of my own time, I pay a lot less attention, and it would be ever so nice if the trend continued.

The graph has some interesting things to show with the highest spike in my own spam, ever, coming in early May, and for once, the daily volume at the end of the year appears to be on a downward trend to a level comparable to the beginning of the year. There was a lot of variability; I thought I heard rumblings of culpable ISPs being shut down and the like. I didn't listen much.

I guess that's kind of where that hobby lies now. The major concerns for my realms of responsibility are how to interact with big players like Google and Yahoo without running afoul of their own spam prevention measures. So long as fools keep making the operations of spammers a profitable one, our open communications system will slowly gather more hairballs and dust bunnies, clouding its original open nature. I do hope the wondrous future brings us something better. In the meantime, down with spammers, and three cheers for the hard work of anti-spammers everywhere.