The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online.
Chalk up a win for the good guys! sourceE-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent as of Tuesday evening. Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second.
Have you noticed a decline in spam to your mail servers?
We use the F5 Message Security Module with TrustedSource.org as our front line RBL service, and the Spamhaus.org RBL as the secondary RBL check against any incoming connections that make it past the F5 MSM check to to the actual mail servers. Historically the F5 MSM check has blocked 70% of incoming e-mail connections. The stats needed to be reset to gather information going forward, so I'll be able to post an updated F5 MSM connections blocked statistic tomorrow. Historically the Spamhaus RBL has been blocking 33.74% of mail connnections that make it past the MSM check and today they are blocking 17.89% of incoming connections.
-Raymond