my gauge is the number of spams in my spam folder on gmail. Since spams get automatically deleted after 30 days, we can easily calculate the 30 day average. A long time ago, the number was several hundred, but over the past year it has dropped down to about 60, (or about 2/day). In the last few weeks there was a significant uptick and I am now back at 120. Most new spams seems to be from a single outfit: typical pattern is an all uppercase obfuscated title starting with "FW:" with my e-mail name appended or prepended in lower case (e.g. "FW: S_A F E _&_..F A-S T -- P E_N I_S..--_E..N_L A_R..G-E_M..E_N..T.."), they contain some weird large formatted and colored text and an html attachment. The spam filter gets them all. So, yes, at least for me the spam has about doubled over the last few weeks.
Hmm single outfit that likely has a bot net sending out the spam. Could be fun to try and kill the botnet for them lol. Might be like a local news report here a few years back (many years 99 2001) "noticed a marked decrease in a specific type of spam"
