25 Billion Pieces of Spam

We reached a big milestone today: Akismet caught its 25 billionth piece of spam. We’re now detecting spam at a rate of around 40 million comments a day.

We’d love to do even more. If you know of a blog, forum or social network that needs some help filtering spam, please let them know we’re here to help!

To celebrate the milestone, we’ve built a minisite with a guide to some of the different kinds of spam we filter. Check it out here: 25 billion minisite.

And, of course, we have some stats! We’ve dug through the 25 billion spams (well, some of the more recent ones) and found the following:

• Spammers are busiest on Friday at 20:00 GMT.
• Spammers are least active on Sundays at 14:00 GMT. (Do spammers go to church?!)
• A blog comment is 8% more likely to be spam on a Saturday morning than it is on a Tuesday evening.

And the winner is…
So what, you’ll be asking, was the 25 billionth spam? Here it is, a little bit of not‑so‑innocent flattery:

The lucky recipient was Harrisonburg’s Community News Network site hburgnews.com, to which we’re pleased to give a free lifetime subscription to Akismet!