To start with, Hotmail's numbers:

• 3 emails accepted from Hotmail, at least two of them likely spam.
• 263 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail email addresses.
• 106 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 33 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hit our spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused due to their origin IP address (five for being in the SBL, and one from Nigeria).

Despite all of these crappy numbers, we've determined that we get at least some legitimate and wanted email from Hotmail, so we will not be blocking them entirely. Oh well. Dear Hotmail: please fix your spam problems .

On the rest of the numbers:

This week we received 16,179 email messages from 209 different IP addresses. Our SMTP server handled 23,552 sessions from 2,014 different IP addresses. Email volume is slightly down from last week , although session volume is up significantly and the number of sources has doubled.

Connection volume is up significantly from last week : 150,000 connections from at least 42,800 different IP addresses. Again there is a significant jump in the number of different IP addresses trying to talk to us.

Most of the week looks relatively ordinary (although overall higher than last week ), but come Friday and we see a significant upturn. I suspect that this trend will continue on through next week.

Kernel level packet filtering top ten:

Host/Mask           Packets   Bytes
213.140.2.68           6694    402K
210.215.122.10         5600    269K
207.145.162.56         5552    266K
83.170.21.250          5047    242K
222.166.82.174         4860    292K
212.216.176.0/24       3766    187K
195.135.141.22         2620    131K
217.34.169.49          2475    126K
194.102.202.34         2209    106K
81.193.116.226         2108    101K

Apart from Telecom Italia's outgoing mail servers, this is all individual hosts.

• Only 222.166.82.174 returns from before .
• 213.140.2.68 is a fastwebnet.it machine; we don't talk to any of them due to too much spam.
• 83.170.21.250, 222.166.82.174, and 217.34.169.49 are all what we consider 'dialup' machines.
• 207.145.162.56 is on the ORDB.
• 195.135.141.22 is on the CBL.
• 210.215.122.10 and 81.193.116.226 are both lacking in good reverse DNS.
• 194.102.202.34 sent us too many unresolvable HELO greetings.

The overall packet counts are up somewhat over last week .

Connection time rejection stats:

  29999 total
  14435 dynamic IP
   8935 bad or no reverse DNS
   4243 class bl-cbl
    620 class bl-sbl
    497 class bl-ordb
    326 class bl-sdul
    249 class bl-dsbl
    222 class bl-spews
     54 class bl-njabl
     11 class bl-opm

The 'dynamic IP' and CBL numbers have jumped significantly, without having any one single source. It looks like spammers have started up targeting our users with significant spam runs, most of which we have hopefully refused.

I'm not surprised by the sudden jump in both of these numbers, although I'm not thrilled either (especially by the jump in bad bounces, since that means spammers are back to forging us into the origin addresses of their spams).