Ooookay. So, for fun, I've been archiving spam. Unfortunately, I haven't been fighting it. I'm mostly apathetic about it, which means I'm part of the problem. It just seems so futile from here, and it's only going to get worse. Anyway, on to the numbers. I like numbers.
I have 8 email addresses, plus I monitor the Roadrunner master account, which is unused. Two are personal email addresses – my personal domain address, and my personal isp address. Three are hotmail – one I use for web crap, a very old one that has been used on Usenet, and one I made for reasons I cannot recall just now. Two more are the webmaster accounts for my .net and .com domain, and the last one is one I used exclusively for Usenet. That last one I've retired and am now using a new one with munging. I used to be opposed to munging on Usenet; now I believe it's crucial.
I, personally, received 20,007 plus spam emails in 2003. There was actually more – I had a couple of months of spotty archiving. These emails take up 140 MB of disk space.
Fully 65.25% came to my hotmail addresses; the one used on Usenet is 5 years old and gets 49% of all spam.
10.57% goes to my two personal addresses. The ISP address gets twice the spam of my robandjen.net address. It's also older.
My Usenet address gets 20.25%; webmaster on robandjen.net gets just a smidge, .73%.
Various addresses get 3.17% – these are malformed addresses (bmastgr??), info/sales, others I couldn't specifically identify.
The master account (ISP) which has never been used for anything got at least 2 spams.
Amusingly, I get a smidge of legacy spam to “us at robandjen.com” for the previous domain owner.
Conclusions:
– dump old usenet address and use munging
– get new web crap hotmail address, dump the other three
– figure out how to dev-null properly
You allowed 20,000 spam messages to take up 140mb of disk space and then you performed statistics on them…honey, you need a new hobby ;-)
Seriously, that works out to 54 messages a day. And yes, I can only see it getting worse. Part of the problem is the number of spam emails that come from munged or throwaway addresses…I still don’t see what one can do about those.
honey, you need a new hobby ;-)
Damn, that line made me laugh so hard I scared the dog!
And you’re SOOO right!
At least she doesn’t paw through it looking for malicious code :-/
Granted, dealing with malicious code is my job, but it was my idea to comb my spam for it.
We hates SPAM!
First – the icon of Max on the computer is great! I had to put my old email address with dfw.net to rest. I hated doing that, but my God, you should have seen the SPAM. That account got nothing but SPAM.
I have DSL with Verzion, so I have up to 8 accounts that I can have. The main account, I only use that for paying bills and etc. It gets very little unsolicited SPAM. I am trying harder to resist putting my email address on anything unless I really want stuff from people. Getting a mailbox full of crap is NOT what I want to sift through on a daily or hourly basis.
Re: We hates SPAM!
SpamAssassin is your friend.
Set up one of your old boxes as a Linux box that pulls all your e-mail and filters it. You get your mail from there, not from your accounts.
That’s what we do here :)