Idaho Tops America's Most-Spammed States

An anonymous reader writes "MessageLabs unveiled a list of the top US spammed states, with surprising results — the spam capital of the US is Idaho, with 93.8 percent of spam, far exceeding the global spam rate for September 2009 of 86.4 percent. Idaho has jumped 43 spots since 2008 when it was ranked the 44th most spammed state. The difference can be attributed to the resilient and aggressive botnet market as well as a higher volume of global spam that has ensued since the beginning of the credit crisis toward the end of 2008."

Article is nonsense

[timeOday]

I don't think whoever wrote the article understands what they're trying to explain. First, the author repeatedly says "percent of spam" (e.g. "the spam capital of the US is Idaho with 93.8 percent of spam," and "...Puerto Rico, with 83.1 percent of spam") when apparently the data is actually the percent of email received in the state which is spam. Second, the explanations given for Idaho topping this list have no relevance to the question whatever. Claiming botnets and the recession are to blame with no attempt to explain how these factors impact Idaho different than other states is nonsense! Finally, even if the author understood the data, the data is uninteresting without some test of statistical significance. The difference between states with highest and lowest spam rates is only 10%, is that significant? Is it repeatable if you sampled during a different interval? Who knows.

Re:usa

[timeOday]

From what I gather it's not the ones that receive the most spam, but rather those for whom spam is the highest proportion of email. Maybe Idahoans receive the same number of spams as everybody else, but simply send and receive fewer legitimate emails. Or maybe there is no systematic difference between states at all, and the results would be entirely different if you looked at any month other than September 09. With just one sample there is no measure of variance and therefore no way to tell whether the result is significant.

How would you measure this?

[sl4x74]

OK, I live in Idaho. My email addresses are Gmail and me.com accounts. How would they know that those email addresses belong to someone in Idaho? I assume the email servers where the email is delivered probably aren't even in this state. Furthermore, Google's spam filtering is pretty darn good and I rarely see any spam. Not sure what difference it makes where you live.

Re:Maybe...

[chill]

The panhandle, up near Coeur d'Alene, is gorgeous country. If you like outdoor activities: skiing, hiking, boating, hunting, fishing, 4x4ing, etc. it can't be beat short of Alaska.