akismet
It’s been almost three months since I installed the Akismet plugin to deal with comment spam. In that time it has caught 6,716 spam comments!
If we assume about 5KB per comment, which seems a reasonable estimate, that would equate to nearly 33MB of wasted bandwidth. It’s a good thing that I’m allowed up to 10GB a month. 
At work, I’m responsible for looking after the webservers that drive our website. Amongst other things, the website contains a variety of online forms. None of these result in content published online, instead they invariably fire off an email to someone within the organisation. I’ve had complaints from people who are receiving spam messages submitted via these forms, not that there’s much I can do about it. But I get the impression that these spammers are crawling all over the internet and submitting their strange messages into every single online form they come across.
If you were to tot up the costs of all this wasted bandwidth and wasted time for organisations and individuals around the world, how much would it come to?
Morgaine says:
I remember just over a week ago, when Akismet was not working properly, and all those spam comments went in the moderation queue. As I get an e-mail each time a comment is posted, my inbox was working overtime. Very annoying. Fortunately I’m not a popular blogger, I read Scobleizer recieved over 64 000 pieces of spam. At least it grows into a nice Spamgarden
Morgaine spoke at 11:09 UTC on September 5th, 2006 link