In late February, we began an aggressive campaign to monitor the spam problem in Yahoo! Chat using custom software called Chat Sentry. This software allows us to collect data from many public sources related to Yahoo! Chat and analyze that data based on current trends and known spam distributed across the Yahoo! Messenger network. In early March, we published our preliminary findings that indicated the amount of “Spam Bots” in Yahoo! Chat accounted for nearly 60% of all chat users. These early findings resulted in my posting a comment to the Yahoo! Messenger Blog as well as the creation of this website. Due to the overwhelming response, we continued to monitor the situation and have finished our analysis of the data collected throughout the month of March.

The data analyzed includes over 685,000 messages and over 95,000 users and the results are incredibly discouraging. The overall results show the number of spam bots in Yahoo! Chat is now estimated at 75% of all chat users – far surpassing the preliminary results published in early March. Surprisingly the report also shows that one of the popular third party clients is used by 16% of spam bots encountered throughout the data collection period while all other clients combined were responsible for only .7%.

Not only is the excessive number of bots logged into Yahoo! Chat clogging rooms with useless garbage but the servers have become so overloaded that it can take up to 30 minutes just to enter chat. That is if you are lucky enough to be using a third party client or add-on that automatically retries joining rooms. This is quite disheartening as the Yahoo! community will most certainly continue to dwindle unless Yahoo! makes a concerted and aggressive effort to eliminate this junk from chat.

Below are the summary statistics generated from the overall report and are separated into three sections: All users, Live users, and Spam Bots. These statistics show the number of active and inactive users as well as the number of messages posted by each category of user.

Statistics for Live Users*
Live users	23217	24.20% of all users
Live users posting messages	17764	76.51% of live users
Live users not posting messages	5453	23.49% of live users
Live user message count	293457	42.83% of messages

The painful realization is that the Spam problem will continue to grow until aggressive measures are put in place to eliminate it from the Yahoo! Messenger network.

* The report was compiled using data collected from all publicly available resources by our Chat Sentry software including chat room and private messages and user profile data. Message and profile data were analyzed using known trends and content posted by Spam Bots including content contained in their user profile as well as manual validation of both live users and Spam Bots. This report has an estimated 2.5% margin of error.