What's your spam-to-virus ratio these days? Does that say anything about the economics of spam?

What's the proportion where you'd say "no WAY would anyone ever BUY this"? Has that proportion gone up recently? Does that say anything about the economics of spam?

Of course, there is the trivially easy "How long and/or thick would Little Brad be if all of the manhood-enhancement spam were answered and actually worked"...but you might have done that analysis already.

I think Chris has pegged it. That's the data inquiring minds are clamouring for.

I'm the original developer of SpamAssassin (now just one of several). And I must say, wow, that's a lot of spam

Have you got an always-on UNIX machine handy, with plenty of CPU time free? And do you use a sensible mail app, like pretty much anything apart from Outlook? Because a great way to give back to SA, especially with a collection of mail like that, is to run "mass-check" over it and help out with our rescoring runs. it's pretty easy -- but very UNIX-based.

The bonus, of course, is that SA optimises itself to handle your mail

It's more-or-less impossible to figure out what your mail might be about -- pretty much the only thing made visible in the uploaded results, is the names of your mail folders.

More details are at:
http://spamassassin.org/dist/masses/README
http://spamassassin.org/dist/masses/CORPUS_SUBMIT

we also do nightly runs as well -- ie. you set up a crontab to run SA over your mail collection once per night, and it uploads the results for ongoing rule QA...

http://spamassassin.org/dist/masses/CORPUS_SUBMIT_NIGHTLY

cheers!

The only spam I seem to get is either from someone trying to sell me a new mortgages or a penis enlargement. I can't help but wonder whether one could finance a penis enlargement with a second mortgage?

Would your programming skills allow you to extract from your large spam collection additional syngergies that today's e-marketers haven't yet thought of?