It’s amazing what you find when digging through old backups. Another item I found was my ancient collection of mailboxes for my catchall address. In early February 2007 I finally surrendered to the spammers that were hammering my mail server. There was no hint that the spam rate was going to decrease, so the catchall went away.

This chart shows the change, from 61 messages in January 2002, to more than 85,000 in January 2007. It took until May 2002 to break 100; 11 months later to break 1,000; then until October 2004 to shatter the 10K barrier with 12,428.

If I get a few minutes free (ha!) I’ll re-enable to catchall to see how much garbage comes through.

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As I mentioned yesterday when I noticed I passed the 30,000 spam comment threshold, the comment spam rate on the blog has gone through the roof. I dug out some of my old backups of my WordPress database and generated this chart showing how many spam comments I’ve received. This chart is from December 14, 2006 (8,105 spam comments) through today (31,601 spam comments).

This chart shows the daily rate of how many spam comments have been received. The peak before today was December 14-19, when I was getting 143 spam messages per day. Since yesterday the rate has been 1,154 per day.

I just deleted my 30,000th comment spam. I have no idea how high the count would have been had I not put into place several techniques that automatically block bad commenters. Those that fall into my traps don’t even get entered into the Akismet system, and so aren’t counted.

(Addendum 9:32pm: The count is now up to 30,447. That comes to one new spam comment every 63 seconds.)