Spam museums to save junk email

Most people's response to seeing the usual spam in their inbox is to hit delete. Two men, however, have decided to save the world's junk email for future generations.

Stephen Newton has opened the virtual doors of his spam museum, where he aims to preserve the messages pushing porn, pills and other nonsense that are sent to him via unsolicited email.

Newton says in his blog: "Millions – billions – of messages outnumbering all the legitimate stuff is hurled through cyberspace every day… only to be deleted in anger and frustration. So I've decided to rescue some of it."

He added somewhat optimistically in a statement: "The museum will ensure that should the spammers be defeated, we’ll have a place to go and remind ourselves what the fuss was all about."

Newton, from Manchester, has posted his email addresses on his website to try and attract more spam for the museum. All messages received are posted to the site "as is".

While there's been surprisingly little porn, Newton said the Nigerian 419 scams have been plentiful.

Across the pond, Raymond Chen - a Microsoft employee - has claimed to have catalogued ever piece of spam and every virus he has received to his work email address since mid-1997.

Unlike Newton, Chen doesn't want to preserve spam for posterity. He said on his blog: "Occasionally, it comes in handy, for example, to add naïve Bayesian spam filter to my custom-written email filter."

While not publicly displaying, the results of his spam deluge, Chen has charted the rise of spam and viruses for seven years and found by studying the contents of his inbox, that the spam phenomenon started to boom in 2002 and found the most 'spammy' viruses to be Sobig and Netsky, with the worst day for viruses - around the time when Sobig made its appearance - was 23 August 2003.

Chen's work email has so far received 227.6MB of spam in around 19,000 messages and 61.8MB of viruses in about 3,500 messages.