Maintaining my lead is tricky business

About a month or go or so, I was mentioning how I created a search pattern for spam that hit 9 million times in one day.  I was quite proud of that and I figured that was the record for spam pattern matching (it was quite specific).

Since then, I have been dethroned as two of my colleagues have each written separate search patterns and both of them have exceeded my record.  One averages 18.5 million hits per day, the other averages 15 million per day.  Some of you may wonder why I even care about this, but for some reason, I like holding the spam catching record.  Some may say "Spam fighting is not a competition."  Well, it is to me.  Nobody else plays along so I'm the only one actually competing (and awarding trophies).

So, I was defeated for a bit until recently.  As it turns out, last week I created another search pattern that detects something found in image-spam, and it has averaged, over the course of a week, 21 million hits per day!  I have regained my title!  The problem is that my match is not as specific as my coworkers' patterns and therefore theirs is much more likely to identify a message as spam than mine is.

By the way, the fact that I'm talking about millions per hit illustrates just how pervasive the problem of spam really is - I now measure effectiveness in terms of millions rather than thousands.