The spam really is getting worse

In December I started feeling like the spam I get was becoming... more frequent. Being a statistician, this is the kind of thing that is provable with data. I used to graph the number of spam emails I get on a chart. It had gotten better and I slacked off. But in December I did a data pull.

The following is a control chart (a fancy time ordered plot). Each point is the number of spam emails I got on that day. I've separated the data into 2012 (when I used to collect data), Oct/Nov 2015 and now. The green and red lines are mostly for reference. But if you are interested, the green line is an average and the red lines are +/- 3 standard deviations from the average. In theory, for a process that has no outside force driving it (an evil human doing this to me!!!), points should fall randomly between the red lines that I set up in 2012.


Now I believe that someone has decided to use my actual email address as a spam dump. I am receiving frequent repeated emails from vendors who have the persistent belief that I came to their website and signed up for something, giving them my email address. Every day or so a new vendor joins the chorus.

So the graph shows that the process has actually changed. I'm not crazy, it really changed in the past month. *sigh*