Spam
Within the past two years my spam level has gone from an average of 200 a month (6 or 7 a day) to this month, where I just hit 2000 spam. This is getting insane. The good thing is that the gmail spam catcher is getting most of them, and many that that doesn’t get, my mail client grabs. The bad thing is that I used to look through my spam folder on gmail on occasion to make sure that no false positives are getting through. Unfortunately with so many a day, I just don’t look any more and am afraid that I might miss important e-mail. Does anyone else get this much spam? I’ve always been reasonably careful about putting my e-mail out there, but I guess I’m just on enough lists now… There are so many, and I am so busy that I haven’t actually made an effort to see how they are getting to me. My hope is that one of my old school e-mails is forwarding most of it, and I can just shut that forwarding off.
So tell me… do you get 60-70 spam a day, and should I just quit my whining?
October 23rd, 2006 at 10:19
I do not get 60-70 spams a day. Maybe 10 on average? I don’t pay too much attention, because the vast majority goes straight into the gmail spam box.
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:27
I’m over 100/day now, I think. And even though I tweak SpamAssassin pretty regularly, a lot of those are ending up in my main inbox. :/
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:49
I’m well into the ’several hundred’ per day range over my actively-used accounts. My uchicago account and cs account get particularly nailed. As a result, I mostly ignore them. I will point out that I am stingey with my email addresses - I just don’t have total control over where some of them go.
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:56
According to Eudora, I got nearly 6000 spam in September (about 200 a day) and I’m on track to get that many in October.
I get a 20-40 a day because I get all the bounces for a mailing list. I plan on shutting down my cs.uchicago.edu account because I know I get a lot of spam from it.
-alain
p.s. Your mathematical question is easy, but it’s really annoying when I forget to answer it. I get a page reminding me, but when I hit the back button, it has erased all the text that I typed in. On more than one occasion, I just gave up and didn’t bother retyping it. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know…
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:13
I have no idea.
I have three sets of spam filters: pobox, gmail, and Eudora. Almost no spam reaches Eudora; it’s all caught somewhere between pobox in the first pass and gmail in the second. When there’s a false hit, both pobox and gmail seem to be equally likely to declare it as spam.
Looking at my pobox reports, it looks like I’ve flat-out bounced (with “no such mailbox” messages) around 2800 pieces of spam in the past 30 days. Bouncing is based on criteria I’ve chosen as reliable; I never see these messages.
Around 100 more messages were held for review on the pobox site; of these, I said that 8 were false-positives (they were mostly advertising, just advertising which was OK).
After the pobox pass, it seems like 5 messages or so a day are flagged by gmail as spam. I’d say it’s right around 90% of the time.
I will admit, I’m disappointed my spam count hasn’t gone down so far as I can tell. I hoped that by letting pobox bounce with the “no such mailbox” response, I’d get taken off of some of these lists. Wishful thinking, perhaps. Or maybe I just need to review the month-to-month reports; scarily enough, it _could_ be working.
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:32
I’m also getting about 6000 spam messages a month (according to the current size of my gmail spam folder). Gmail catches most of them, and I have more or less given up on looking for false positives because it’s so much work to look for them amidst the junk.
October 25th, 2006 at 08:57
Wow, put up a message about spam and I get more comments than I do on anything else! But it looks like I am below everyone but Pam, so I should just quit my bitching and trust my spam filter.
Oh well.
October 25th, 2006 at 09:02
No, keep bitching! Put up a fight! And then tell us what you did which helped. =)