More spam - a success story

The number of emails that we're receiving and are marked as spam has significantly increased in the last couple of weeks, and I'm celebrating. Does it sound odd to celebrate a spam increase? The reason is that the overall number of emails hasn't risen in line and it points to greater success in filtering emails.

The graph to the right shows our email traffic ... a snapshot up to just a few minutes ago. Each vertical line represents a week, and each horizontal line is 250 emails. Blue represents emails marked as spam and red represents emails allowed through to our mailboxes.

As a priority, we try to run our system so that it's mostly "fail safe" because I don't want customers' emails to be bounced needlessly. If that happened too much at least some of them might decide to become FORMER customers! So the red "allowed through" block still includes doubtful emails.

Our dynamic email status page can be used to see how we generated this graph and you can learn all about how it's done on our four day PHP course

Update - 30th November We're now marking some 80% of the incoming traffic as spam rather than the 50% it was 6 weeks ago. Total traffic levels remain static, and I don't think we're loosing any valid emails; PLEASE TELL ME if you know / think otherwise.

(written 2005-11-13, updated 2006-06-05)

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Some other Articles

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More spam - a success story
MySQL - a score of things to remember
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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