Right, before you get on anything resembling a lofty equine, let me point out that this blog is for my benefit. Therefore, if I choose to use it as a convenient piece of scrap paper upon which to doodle, then I shall do.

I have spent the past twenty minutes playing around with Unix commands to analyse my procmail logs. The goals are roughly as follow -- to see how much email I get, who I get it from, and how much of it is spam.

If I could be bothered, then I would do all sorts of graphs. But I won't. Oh, OK then. This is a graph of how much email I received every month, since March 1999. Note certain gaps, for August 99 - July 2000, while my email was being delivered to another system, and another around December 2001, for no good reason I can think of.

1300                                                       

1250                                        #              

1200                                        #              

1150                                        #              

1100                          #             #             #

1050                          #             #             #

1000                          #             #             #

 950                          #           # #             #

 900                          #           ###             #

 850                          #           ####            #

 800                          #           ####        #   #

 750                          #           ####       ##  ##

 700                          #           ####     #### ###

 650                          #           ####     #### ###

 600                       #  ##          #####   ##### ###

 550                       #  ##   #      #####   ##### ###

 500                   ##  ## ##   #      ######  #########

 450                  ### ### ### ##     ######## #########

 400                  ### ### ######   ####################

 350                  ############### #####################

 300                  ############### #####################

 250                  ############### #####################

 200# ##              ############### #####################

 150######           ################ #####################

 100######           ################ #####################

  50######           ################ #####################

   0######           ################ #####################

    MAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJAS

    1999      2000        2001        2002        2003

Some quick analysis: the data from 1999 is interesting because it shows how much my email has increased in the intervening years. In theory, the activity from 1999 should be relatively high, since I was quite bored at the time, and tended to email people a lot more than I do now. However, these charts are of incoming mail (can't be bothered to analyze outgoing, since it automatically gets sorted into folders, and I don't want to go digging around), and I think what this is mainly showing is how much spam I get. I will do some more poking around to figure out how much of this is spam. Almost certainly, more of this will follow...