This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.
In June, Akismet caught 5,349,305,000 pieces of spam – that includes spam comments, forum posts, contact form submissions, etc. If each piece of spam were one meter (that’s about three feet), that would be enough spam to tour around the Earth 130 times!
Even so, the number of spam pieces caught this month is 18% less than the number caught last month. But, we caught 69% more spam pieces this month than last year in June. Here’s a breakdown of the amount of spam and ham (that is, real) messages detected by Akismet this month:
As usual, there is much more spam going around than ham – there were only 2,847,015,00 non-spam messages detected by Akismet in June, which makes up just 5% of all the messages reviewed by Akismet. If each real messages were one meter, they would only be enough for 7 tours around the Earth.
This month, same as last month, there weren’t any big dips or spikes in spam numbers. The busiest day of the month was June 11th with about 201 million spam messages caught, the slowest day was June 22nd with about 144 million spam caught. In June we missed only 1 in about 2,956 spam comments.
There were no service interruptions this month, so the fluctuations of in the numbers of spam comments detected are part of spam’s natural ebb and flow. For service interruption announcements you can visit our Akismet API status page or follow us on Twitter.
The spam statistics you see on your own site may resemble those we see in aggregate, or they may have larger spikes or troughs. If you’re seeing much more spam than usual, please contact us so we can help you sort things out :).
Spam Reading We Enjoyed
- The new Canadian anti-spam law comes into effect today, but The Montreal Gazette reports that small businesses are not yet fully ready for it, though they still have time to prepare
- Business Insider’s Gus Lubin tells us what happens when you incorrectly click the spam button in your email inbox: marking an email as spam when it’s really not, is not cool.
- This article from PC World reminds us that most spam comes from just a few sources (yet another example of the 80-20 rule), and the best way to thwart spam comments is by staying vigilant.
Akismet 
Well done, and thank you for sharing theses stats Valerie; and those last three spam comments were interesting, comedic, and probably ironic(?).
I think that more online services should use Akismet to help with the fight against spam along with other measures, if only more people knew about Akismet, and maybe you should contact companies like Facebook/Twitter/Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/Disqus/et cetera to see if they would be interested in using Akismet (unless you already have) because I see a lot of spam comments coming from Facebook/Twitter/et cetera accounts around the internet in various comment sections.
Keep up the good work,
-John Jr