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.

1997 UBE Chart

 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