Does SPAM Peak on Wednesday?

danlor asks: "After installing a pretty good spam filter here at work, we noticed an interesting weekly trend in overall spam intercepts. They peak on Wednesday and trough o n Sunday. It is an almost perfect bell curve. We have gone over this quite a few times here, but cannot come to consensus on why this would be. Could Spammers really be God fearing? Why would Spammers have a 'hump' day?" Has anyone else noticed this trend?

Comments

Maybe they send from work or school?

[narratorDan]

That would account for the wednesday peek and sunday valley. Or during the week is when there is the most net traffic in general and this helps to cover up their activities. Allows them to become "lost" in the sea of data.

NarratorDan

People Effect

[Stone Rhino]

I didn't see a clear explanation of your product's methods for spam filtering, but if it's anything like other products that judge email to be spam based on the votes of the users who see it, it could simply be a matter of workers blocking mail on monday, that other workers block on tuesday, that builds to a crest on wednesday and then falls off because in the end of the week, you have already recieved the emails that were judged to be bad on monday (but were still coming). Acutally, this sounds stupid now that I mention it, but there could be a similar building effect. With all the relays that spam bounces through, it's possible that you could be recieving messages late, and as spammers take a weekend off, your messages drop off dramatically. Just a thought.

This seems to be a trend with legit email too

[SpaFF]

At the University where I administer a Linux mail server, I have noticed that my graphs for Incoming mail, Outgoing mail, and Incoming spam always make nice little bell curves every week. For Saturday and Sunday, each graph drops to very low levels (almost flatline when scaled with the rest of the weeks mail). It all shoots up Monday morning starting around 7:30 when everyone gets into work. Tuesday is always a little higher than Monday, and Wednesday is the highest for all Incoming,Outgoing and Spam. Thursday is almost always very close to Tuesday and Friday is almost always very close to Monday.

This seems to be attributed to human nature. There is more correspondence going on Wednesday's because people just don't feel like doing as much work on Monday's and Friday's.