I’ve talked a little bit before about spam and how I handle it. I’ve owned this domain for quite a while now, and it has (seemingly) appropriately become the target for the everyday spam king. Back in April last year, I started to keep my mailserver logs as a sort of experiment, the idea being that I’d look again a year later to see how much spam I received in that year.

Well, I got a little impatient. And when I get impatient I write hideously inelegant scripts that nevertheless get the job done. I decided that I wanted to make a graph of my daily spam rejects / deliveries and that lovely charts at amcharts would be a good way of displaying this nicely. Great in theory, but I had to get the data together. Given that my mailserver rotates it’s logs at 6am GMT, I had to write a script to take each day’s logs, munge them all together, re-categorize them by per day and then count them. Also, it needs to update it every day, without reprocessing the whole lot. A lot of cursing later I got something working, and I’ve put the results over at SpamWatch. I’m not quite sure what the purpose of this is, or what the graph is meant to show. I’ll think of something.