Sharp Tools

Spamariffic!

An old schoolmate and colleague of mine Raymond Chen just put up some nicely interesting data on his weblog. He apparently carefully saves every piece of spam that makes it through his corporate spamfilters to his account, preserving them much as a fastidious Englishman might fold his hanky over a juicy piece of sputum before pocketing it, and once in a while he doles out some lovely bits of data such as this.

Ray already goes into most of the really interesting conclusions there on the page. I find myself wondering what a similar graph for me would look like; while I typically save big chunks of spam to train each new generation of heuristic filter, I don't have any unbroken chains anywhere near that long. Data like this is the source of so many of those "Hey, I wonder..." questions that sometimes end up producing the Really Good Ideas, though. Good on ya, Ray. Posted by jbz at September 19, 2004 8:51 PM | TrackBack