Well, there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, sausage, spam, spam, bacon, spam, tomato and spam;

Monty Python

One of the benefits of running your own mail server is you get to choose how to protect yourself against spam. Unix based mail servers have had this facility for a long time but as Windows based mail servers became more mature this facility finally appeared in a more friendly form. The mail server I use, Mdaemon, comes with a version of Spam Assassin and the ability to check public, DNS based blacklists.

Every day my mail server checks incoming IPs against blacklists I choose to trust, then based on the results of those lookups I can choose to accept or reject the incoming connection.

So how many connections am I rejecting daily? Hundreds and it's growing. In true geek style I decided to parse the rejection logs daily, put everything into a database and see what comes out. Here are the results, from the monthly summary you can drill down by day to see exactly what mail attempts were rejected.

The pages get updated just after midnight every day as the previous days logs are added to the database.