This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.
In August, there were 7,203,785,500 pieces of spam that came through Akismet. If each piece of spam were one word, it would take 6645 copies of the Harry Potter series to accomodate them all.
Here’s a breakdown of the number of spam and legitimate comments (what we call ham) we saw last month:
Our busiest day was August 21, with about 269 million spam messages, and the slowest day was August 3 with 173 million. We missed only about 1 in every 5,916 spams.
The number of spam message is up 92% from last year, which is a similar large rise we’ve seen in previous months. It’s also up from last month by 28%.
The number of legimate messages that went through this month is 33,377,8500. If each legitimate comment was a word, they’d only fill 307 copies of the Harry Potter series. The amount of legitimate content going around is only about 4% – and the large difference is business as usual.
As always, if your own missed spam or false positive numbers are on the rise, we’d love to help. You can reach out through our contact form.
August was a big month in the spam universe, three services were in the news. Google added new spam filtering support to Gmail – you can find more info on PC World. Twitter announced its new spam filtering system, BotMaker. And, Apple’s iMessage seems to have been hit with a bout of spam. Wired explained why, though MacWorld showed us why the numbers may not in fact be so dire.
And now for a question for the readers: what other data tidbits would you like to see mentioned or discussed in these monthly spam reports? We’d love to hear from you, and accomodate where we can :)
