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

Re:Graphs?

[PD]

I've got some graphs on my own website for the past three weeks, and I also noticed a definite trend toward spam peaking in the middle of the week.

http://www.pdrap.org/spam_statistics/graphs is my web page with the graphs. The total height of the bar is all the mail I've received. The red part is the spam.

The bottom graph is a chart of the accuracy of my bayesian spam filter. In just the three weeks that I've been tracking, the filter has gotten notably worse. I've noticed several spams that seem to be crafted specifically to get around bayesian filters.

I spoke with a spammer once

[polyphemus-blinder]

Don't worry, he didn't leave with his kneecaps.

But before I uncapped him, I was able to glean this much about their mailing habits: apparently, whether true or not, there is a prevailing idea in the spam community that Wednesday mid-morning is the best time to send spam.

There idea is that this maximizes the likelihood of it being read; they consider weekends not to be important because people are occupied with funner things than spam; they consider Monday and Tuesday to be "warmup" days into the week, when people may actually be doing work. Thursday and Friday they consider "slackoff" days in which people not only don't do work, but don't read email either. So that leaves Wednesday. And if you analyze your logs further, I bet you'll find that the peak within Wednesday is mid-morning, not the grogy, naptime after lunch hours. That's what I see with my filter, anyway.