Author: M.Prince (1 Dec 04 12:46pm)
I'd guess that the stats will be up and running in a couple of months. A lot of the stats we've planned are things like comparing the rate of harvesting over time. In order to display that we need some adequate history.
In addition, some stats we want to publish, like the average time from harvest to first email, are also proving to be longer than we initially anticipated. We hypothesized that it would be typically 3 or 4 days from when a harvester visited your web page to when you began receiving spam as a result. It's turning out in many cases to be several weeks. And we can see some instances where known harvesters have visited a page but the address handed out there has, in almost a month, not yet received any spam.
We want any information we publish to be as accurate and meaningful as possible, therefore we'll hold off on putting up the detailed stats pages until we've got a bit more history under our belts.
Just so you know, right now some stats for individual honey pots are available. For example, you can see what harvesters have visited your honey pots and when they visited. You can also get a sense of the number of emails that have been sent to addresses handed out through your honey pot(s).
We do not make the emails sent to your honey pot in particular available, per se, but I think you'll be able to get the gist if what you suspect is happening in fact is. After one of the honey pot addresses you hand out receives a message you'll be able to log into your account and view the details on the harvester that picked up the address. Associated with that harvester will be one or more mail servers. If you click on the mail server's IP address then we display some sample FROM and SUBJECT lines from the messages we've received. If you see your competitor listed there then your suspicion will be confirmed.
One of the upgrades we're planning at some point is a more full view of a sample message received. We need to be careful, however. Some spammers include malicious javascript or web bugs that report back to their servers. We are working on ways to strip these elements and still preserve the general look and feel of the messages. That update, however, is probably still at least a few months off.
Thanks for your interest in the Project!
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