Mollom Blocks Its 100 Millionth Spam Message

mollom.jpgMollom, a spam prevention tool that competes with Automattic’s Akismet, has blocked a stunning 100,000,000 spam messages from appearing on websites, social networks and blogs since the product was introduced about 14 months ago.

Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways. According to Mollom co-founder Dries Buytaert (also the creator of Drupal, one of the most used open source content management systems in the world), the solution is now used by about 10,000 websites across the globe, and the rate at which it is blocking spam messages from appearing on the Web is rapidly increasing. In a blog post, Buytaert says Mollom reached the 25 million blocked spam messages milestone five months ago, and got to the point where it filtered out 50 million of them only two months ago.

The full scorecard, as publicly posted on the company website:

“Mollom is currently protecting 10,052 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.93%. This means that only 7 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 100,537,961 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 297,061 spam messages. On average, 89% of all messages are spam.”

In reality, the number of filtered junk messages is much higher, since he doesn’t take into account private servers it operates on behalf of larger clients and only counts the ones that get blocked on public servers. About 4 million of comment and post spam messages per month get filtered out of just one social network, the rapidly growing Netlog, with which it struck a deal two months ago. In aggregate, Mollom is processing up to 150 million messages a month, which translates to the company needing to handle over 200 million HTTP requests to analyze them appropriately.

That’s a lot of viagra selling drivel for you.