Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).

The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.

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120 billion spam emails. Taste that number. That is how many waste-of-space, soul-sucking, worthless emails pollute the internet every single day. We sampled the not-inconsiderable amount of spam our office mail server gets hammered with every day to estimate the average size of a spam email, which happens to be 4.27 kilobytes (based on a [...]

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Usually downtime on the internet is a Bad Thing ™, whether it is network downtime or server downtime or any other malfunction. But let’s face it, there are some things we would happily see go down. Spam servers If spam would end, even for just a while, the mail servers of the world would heave [...]

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Bink.nu has published some really interesting numbers about Microsoft’s IT infrastructure. Here is a summary with some additional analysis. Inside Microsoft Internally, Microsoft has 10,000 servers in 3 data centers and one operations center. 6 million internal emails per day. 20 million emails from the internet, of which 97% are rejected as spam. Interestingly, if [...]

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Spam is flooding the Internet and now accounts for 94 percent of all emails. When discussing damage caused by spam, one thing that is rarely mentioned is the amount of time lost every day dealing with it. The old saying “time is money” holds as true as ever, and some simple calculations show that spam [...]

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