On Mon, 17 Jan 2011, Steve wrote:
Spam does not bump the average mail size considerably. Average spam mails is way smaller then average normal mails. The reason for this is very simple: Spammers need to reach as many end users as possible. And they need to get those mails out as fastest as possible.
Somewhat correct. Due to a lot of spamfilter setups skip messages above a certain size, we've seen an increase of such big messages. These affect the average quite severely.
An average, however, is only just that: an average. There may not even be 1 message that has exactly the average size...
When looking at last two weeks worth of spam that didn't come from obvious blacklisted sources, I see: 45 messages below 4KB (including quite some miserable failures that forgot to include a message body...)
127 messages above 8KB, of which only 14 above 20KB 940 messages between 4KB and 8KB Yet, the _average_ was well above 8KB, due to a few 500KB+ messages. So, mean, median, or whatever, it's just lies, damn lies, and statistics. -- Maarten
