Anti-spam blogging slowly down as of late

It has not escaped my notice that my anti-spam blogging has slowed down over the past two weeks, as I alluded to in my other post.  It's because I've been involved in a couple of other projects.  The first project is collecting metrics on image spam.  We have a few different strategies used to fight it and I am the one responsible for coming up with a method of measuring it all.  One of the things I am interested in examining is if Method A hits a message, what is the behaviour of Method B and Method C?  Do they also hit?  What about if Method A and C hit, what % of the time is the message subsequently marked as spam?  What about more generic anti-spam methods?  It really is a complicated matrix of relationships between mutually exclusive anti-spam methodologies.  The difficult part is collecting it and making sense of it all.

The second thing I have been working on is the creation of a spam newsletter (a spammy newsletter, what an irony).  This is my first go at it, and the newsletter is basically a collective summary about what is happening in the world of spam, but examining it from the outside world.  In other words, it doesn't mention any of our internal statistics, only general trends about what is going on in the rest of cyberspace.  I also have another weekly report that I have to write which takes me a couple of hours to do; I collect plenty of statistics and then I have to analyze and interpret those figures.  Data collection is one thing, analysis is quite another.  Both of these reports are for internal purposes, but who'd have thought I'd ever get paid to be a writer?