Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

Well the stats have been in and we've been analyzing to look for trends in the spam game.  Here is what our Mr. GoodMail system did in 2009:

12,984,817 email messages passed through for our users
12,295,533 email messages were quarantined as spam
           8,707 email messages contained a virus and were deleted
     680,577 email messages were considered valid and passed to our users

Some interesting trends that we have noted:

- The number of valid messages has increased steadily as new customers have moved to our system.
- Total email messages coming into the system have fluctuated wildly.  When high profile spammers are shut down (which is often newsworthy), we typically see a well defined drop in total messages for 2-3 months.
- The number of virus-infected messages has grown quickly over the past six months.  In the fourth quarter, Mr. GoodMail processed 10-times the number of virus messages as in the second quarter.  Preliminary numbers for January show this trend continuing.
- We noted six false-positives in 2009. These messages were mistakenly marked as spam and quarantined.  Since they were in quarantine, users could still access the mail.  This equates to a rate of one false positive per 2.16 million messages processed.  While we would like to see that reduced to zero, this is among the best in the industry.