I just checked to see how much spam I've been catching with SpamAssassin lately. It'd been a while since I last did this (October 26th according to the message headers).

Well, the mbox file was 649MB in size and contained 56,652 messages.

Christ on toast! That's an annual personal spam volume of over 1GB/year. It's a good thing the government passed that law, otherwise I'd... wait. That law didn't do a damned bit of good, did it?

gzip -9 took it down to 236MB, proving once again that spam doesn't compress very well.

Sigh.

Update: As Craig suggested in the comments, I tried rzip. It got the file down to 70MB. Nice!

Posted by jzawodn at March 21, 2004 12:37 PM

Reader Comments
# Craig said:

Spam's generally not super-compressible within a message, but you might find better compressability between messages, and these messages might be far-separated in your archive if it's so large. I'd try seeing if maybe rzip gives you better compression. http://rzip.samba.org/

on March 21, 2004 04:53 PM
# Jon Gales said:

Why do you save all your spam? Might need a better interest rate in the future? :P.

on March 21, 2004 05:17 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Or a bigger penis.

on March 21, 2004 07:16 PM
# Kasia Trapszo said:

Maybe just generic viagra?

on March 21, 2004 07:34 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Or money from a foreign leader...

on March 21, 2004 07:41 PM
# Scott Johnson said:

Then again, you might just need some good ol' porn.

on March 21, 2004 09:38 PM
# paul robichaux said:

Hey, AOL says their spam rate is dropping (in the midst of a total decline in volume). Maybe this is a harbinger of good things to come?

on March 24, 2004 09:51 AM
# Philip Tellis said:

Bah lossless compression! Try lzip. Never look back again. Make your hard drive feel bigger than it really is.

on March 24, 2004 10:43 AM
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