…and I helped!
December 17th, 2005Yesterday morning, I got an e-mail from the author of the DCC (a collaborative anti-spam system) inquiring about this graph:
(click for bigger graph)
(original here, with some more context) asking if I had made any configuration changes recently. This graph corresponds to the number of messages being reported to the DCC as spam/bulk, and the uptick was mostly reports from the mail servers at work.
After a bit of digging, we figured out that this was a result of us enabling URL-based blocking with DCC, which results in each blocked message being reported as a spam message. This test is blocking and reporting a couple million spams per day to our users, but other graphs show a concurrent uptick in blocked/trapped spam corresponding to roughly 30-40 million more spams blocked per day, mostly (if not completely) due to our reports. Cool!