PhotoDude.com

Interesting notes, but I’m afraid I’ll have to one-up ya on the numbers, Reid.

At present, I’ve got six email accounts, including the new Google Mail one. Most are used for administration of websites (which I’m really really not updating any more), and for the email list I administer. I’ve been using the old standby Earthlink (I still call it Mindspring) to funnel most of these accounts through their spam system, which uses ‘Brightmail’ as a white-listing system. It means that people who really want to talk to me using those addresses need to go through a process to get approved, but it’s not that bad really. Anyone not on my ‘whitelist’ gets dumped into a suspect folder, which I have to go on the website to see. I really don’t check it any more other than for curiosity, or if I know I ordered something online and expect an automated reply.

The numbers these days are simply amazing. As of about a week ago, I was getting upwards of 2,000 spam emails per day in the filtered folders. Yes, two THOUSAND per day. There were times when (based on timestamps) I got over 100 per minute. The way I figure it, if my penis enlarged even one percent as much as each email claimed each time I got one of those spams, by now I could write my name on the Moon.

It’s my opinion, as a 25 year veteran of email, that email as a useful tool is dead. I wage a constant battle here at my office to get email to successfully end up at it’s intended recipient, due to layer upon layer of incompatible spam-filters, virus-filters, routers, and firewalls. Even with all this, I get to contend with users who will click something that says “This do not have any virus, click me plaese!” I describe this as the IQ test of this decade, and unfortunately my users are all sub-20 IQs, in the email sense.

I dunno where it’s going- the Big Boys are fighting over various sender-ID systems. I really don’t care which wins, I just want something, anything, to make it stop…

My experience with Gmail has been pretty much the same – I’d tried three different anti-spam tools before, but Gmail has handled it better by far (and I’m on the receiving end of one to two thousand spams a day – and after a few months of training, I only see 3-5 of those a day). It’s a strange but great comfort, being able to see Gmail collecting a zillion spams in its folder that I never have to even know exist.

“The way I figure it, if my penis enlarged even one percent as much as each email claimed each time I got one of those spams, by now I could write my name on the Moon.”

Oh, that’s quote-worthy.

And if I was even 1% tempted to have “HOT SEX WITH TEEN WEBCAM GIRLS” each time I got one of those spams, by now I’d be doing 20-to-life in Da Big House. And we won’t even talk about those breast enlargement spams. The least these spammers could do is be gender specific with their dreck.

But you (and Noah) point out how e-mail is becoming near useless. I can’t even accurately track how much spam is actually sent to my address each day, that’s why I measured it by what ends up in my Inbox (the only measure that makes me click). If Textdrive is killing 90% of it, and then Gmail is filtering even more, that dozen I see could be the leakers from a daily load of from 200 to 500 to 1000.

I have no way of knowing (nor do I want to). Seeing 100 spams in a minute might be enough to make me give up on e-mail. My worst indicator is a Mindspring/Earthlink address I set up about a year ago. It’s an address that’s never been published and never been used for any signups. In essence, it is a seven letter combination that only exists on the Earthlink mail system, and in my head.

It gets about ten spams a day.

I don’t know what the solution is, either. The Sender ID plan the Big Boys were working on fell apart over some dispute over intellectual property. I fear it won’t be fixed until somebody figures out how to make money from the fix.

I have a mailing list for my biz with about 250 names on it. To get on it, my customers had to physically sign up. About 25% of them routinely bounce due to spam measures. Email as a dependable business tool has been destroyed.

As far as incoming spam, my gmail account (thankee, thankee Pdude) finds it real quick, but I’m only getting about 10 a week. I still depend on procmail and Spamassassin with Bayesian filtering to take care of my biz domain mail.

I used to scan my mailog daily for false positives. I had to give that up when it got to over 10000 per day. I implemented a filter to get rid of dictionary attacks and that cut out about 95% of it. Now I trap the spam that gets through in spam.certain and spam.questionable folders. There’s about 1200/day in spam.certain and another 100/day in spam.questionable. I can at least browse through that stuff. Oh, and there’s my VIRUS folder. I trap about 250/day using our old pal Dallman Ross’s Vsnag procmail plugin.

I was thinking about starting to rely on the old fax machine for business communication again, but someone has to sort through the junk there to find anything relevent. The whole thing is making me dangerously unstable (as opposed to merely unstable, my old personna)

Spams?

I thought that “Spam” was the plural of “Spam.” (Like “sheep” or “shrimp.”)

In the verb form, I would submit that one doesn’t get “spammed.” Rather, one gets “spum.”

Now let’s try it in a conversation:

Ried: I recieved 16 billion spam today.
Fleshy: Wow, you’ve been severely spum.