History
The America Online account that
gathers the statistics presented here was created in 1995.
Each AOL "screen name" is a separate e-mail identity. At the
time this account was created, five screen names were
available to each account. I used four of them for various
purposes including posting to Usenet newsgroups and general
e-mail correspondence.
On 1 November 1996 I stopped using those four screen names
in any way that would allow e-mail broadcasters to collect
their addresses for spamming purposes. However, I continued
to collect the e-mail messages sent to those e-mail boxes.
As you can see from this graph, more than a year after
they went into disuse, those four addresses were still
receiving up to forty unsolicited messages per day.
Noticing how much Unsolicited Broadcast Email (UBE or
"spam") they were receiving, I began to maintain a daily
statistical count of the total UBE volume those four screen
names have received. You may find the data for the next
few years interesting. Starting in April, 2003 the
statistics include the volume of email received by the fifth
screen name, which by that time had been out of use for over
four years.
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004