This is written mainly so I have something to link to from the spam graph.

The Tinotopia ‘spams per hour’ graph records the number of messages that the spam filter on tinotopia.com judges my e-mail account to get; it shows the last seven days.

In this case, it shows that I got about 20 spams in one hour sometime late last night or early this morning:

There have also been two smaller spikes in the past week; looks like the night before last and a few days ago.

This chart doesn’t count the mail that’s bounced because it’s sent to addresses that don’t exist, or because it’s coming from a known spam source: those are rejected by the mail server itself, and they never get to the spam filter. Generally, about 50% of the mail that arrives at the server is rejected outright.

The chart also doesn’t count ‘false negatives’, or spam that actually makes it through to my inbox because it’s too subtle for the filters to catch. At the moment, there are about five to ten of those a day.