Spam Counts for Week Ending June 17, 2007

My GMail 30-day spam count was up 5 (less than 2%) to 303 spam messages in the last 3o days. The second GMail account has stopped receiving phishing emails.

The bad news is I’ve picked up a couple new spam sources. The email address for my ISP (DSL provider) account received four spam emails this past week. This address is one I’ve literally never used. I’ve always used aliases and forwarders rather than ever giving out the actual email address. Based on the other email addresses in the header for a couple of them it looks like they were just spamming a whole sequence of email addresses.

I addition, it looks like the hosting provider ip01-webhost.net spams Whois contact addresses. I use private registration and this past week I received 4 forwarded emails from them with promotional offers. McAfee site advisor has one complaint about them spamming Whois addresses. What’s interesting is that they include the notice:

iP01-webhost.net does not send or support unsolicited email, this email is sent to you because you have been exclusively selected and invited to receive iP01′s services.

They clearly send unsolicited email since I never contacted them. Listing in Whois is hardly “exclusive” and since that’s the only place that email address exists (other than my registrar) there’s little doubt about their selection method. So far it’s only been one email per domain so it’s not egregious, but I don’t think I’d want to do business with a company that starts off playing so loose with their own declared policies.

Website comment spam dropped drastically this week. There were only 671 attempts which is a drop of 73% from the previous weeks 2,458 attempts. Spam Karma caught them all. That’s still an average of 95 attempts a day. The lifetime total for The OS Quest has hit five figures and is now at 10,155.

Comment spam at the Spam Chronicles remains low. There were 6 attempts this week. down 1 from the previous week. The lifetime total for the Spam Chronicles is 210.