Bloodgate.com - spam statistics

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Windows & ActiveState Perl
• Actual statistics with graphs
• Links to other spam archives and graphs
• Acknowledgements

Introduction

These pages describe my attempts to visualize the amount of spam I get. Actually, you can also do stats about ordinary mail, or support mail, or anything else.

What you need is:

• Lot's of spam or ordinary mail
• Perl
• Mail::Graph

Windows & ActivePerl

It also works under Windows, much to my surprise.

Heed over to ActiveState.com and install their latest Perl (currenty 5.6.1 build 631).
You also need some modules. If you do not have an internet connection under windows, this is a bit tricky, but can be done. The basic problem is that installing modules under ActiveState Perl is done via ppm, and I couldn't get it to work with an offline repository.

Here are the two ways to install the necc. modules under Windows and both involve ppm, the ActiveState Package Manager:

If you don't have an online connection under Windows, but have wine, then try the following: (exchange the path below to your Perl installation under Windows):

cd /windows/D/perl/bin
wine perl ppm.bat

When under native windows, just type ppm at a DOS prompt window, or choose Start->Run and type ppm[Enter].

At the ppm prompt type the following:

install GDGraph
[lots of output will appear]
install MIME::Tools
[lots of output]
install Date::Calc
[lots of output again]
quit

Now you should have all modules needed by Mail::Graph. Fetch the Mail::Graph distribution as tar.gz file from CPAN and unzip it to some new directory. You don't need to build or install it, you can work from this directory right away.

• Change to the sample directory. Put your mbox files (see the doc of Mail::Graph for the format) into archive.
• Modify sample.tpl to suit your needs.
• Run sample.pl by clicking onto it, or execute perl sample.pl in a DOS windows.

The statistic along with the pictures should appear in the output directory.

If you have any questions, send me an mail.

Links

Here are some links to other pages using Mail::Graph or something similiar. If you want to be included, drop me a mail.

brian's mail graphs (not using Mail::Graph, but something homegrown)
http://mrtg.smux.net/mailmsgs.html (using MRTG)
Rich's spam archive w/ graphs (it's even bigger than mine)
Paul Wouters' spam archive (it shows nearly the same trend than mine)
The story of 'Nadine' [2002-04-23]
Angus' spam stats [2002-05-28]
SpamCop [2002-05-28]

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all the spammers, who, by flooding my various mail-accounts with their fraudy, illegal, virus-ladden or script-ridden crap made this possible.
Without your constant tries to hammer through my filter, to find some open, unaware server to abuse and to hide, I wouldn't be able to make such fantastic statistics. Thank you.

Tels Created: 2002-04-08 Last modified: 2002-05-28