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.
E-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.
I have an unexpected result to share. It seems that incoming spam connections for my mail server are around the same, or have even increased this past week. Since the statistics reset mentioned in the original post a week ago, 83% of incoming email connections have been dropped at the border before being allowed to connect to the mail servers.