SPAM Thursday, May 08 2008
A while back (June 6th 2003 to be specific) I set up a SPAM filter in Outlook called SpamBayes. This thing has gotten so good at filtering my email it no longer requires constant supervision -- like some spam filters do -- that I no longer bother to check the emails it places in the spam folder. It occasionally gives me a "maybe spam" email or two per day (which are usually spam), but for the most part it has reduced my daily email intake from 200+ to 1 or 2, tops. I have Outlook checking three of my personal email accounts (one yahoo, one this site, and one from another site).
Anyway, it's been roughly a month since I've stopped babysitting this application and I have 1651 (that's right, one thousand six hundred fifty one) unread emails in my SPAM folder. I decided to take a quick peek in there and they all look like SPAM, so I got a few stats from the folder:
Total Items: 4199
Unread Items: 1651
Size: 27172 KB (that's 26.53515625 MB for anyone who can't do all the conversions in their head)
That's right, I have 26.5 MEGABYTES of SPAM in 3 months. And this isn't counting my Hotmail email address, which receives ~80 SPAM emails per day in my Junk Mail folder (I have that set to exclusive filtering, meaning only people I allow to email me are considered Junk). I have three other email addresses I use regularly, two for mailing lists and one at work. The two for mailing lists have received no unwanted SPAM, except the ones that are obviously someone scouring the archives for email addresses. My email at work has received zero SPAM emails, because I refuse to use it for anything.
So the question is, what to do to stop receiving all of these SPAM emails? I know I have to start fresh and get new email addresses, however a couple of these I've had for so long I really can't just abandon them. So I would still need to maintain the old ones, but the new ones I would have to make sure not to post anywhere on the internet (my surrealization email used to be viewable on my website, now it's only viewable through my RSS feed). It's a shame the current situation email is in, I would love to simply make it all stop.
UPDATE:
Grouping up my emails by E-Mail account the email was received in (didn't know you could do that until just now) it turns out that my surrealization email address has only received 60 spams in the past 3 months. My squishyweb account has received 3832 and my Yahoo account 306. I'm really surprised that more bots haven't gone through this website and found my email address. Very interesting, my email address here is (was - I set mine to prive) on a page with a querystring and on squishyweb it's on a page with no querystring. Plus, my squishyweb email has been around for about 2 years longer, so that could be another reason.
I'd really love to start over and keep more detailed records of all of this and track dates and times and everything else to come up with some good advice on how to avoid SPAM from publicly posted email addresses, etc.
Anyway, it's been roughly a month since I've stopped babysitting this application and I have 1651 (that's right, one thousand six hundred fifty one) unread emails in my SPAM folder. I decided to take a quick peek in there and they all look like SPAM, so I got a few stats from the folder:
Total Items: 4199
Unread Items: 1651
Size: 27172 KB (that's 26.53515625 MB for anyone who can't do all the conversions in their head)
That's right, I have 26.5 MEGABYTES of SPAM in 3 months. And this isn't counting my Hotmail email address, which receives ~80 SPAM emails per day in my Junk Mail folder (I have that set to exclusive filtering, meaning only people I allow to email me are considered Junk). I have three other email addresses I use regularly, two for mailing lists and one at work. The two for mailing lists have received no unwanted SPAM, except the ones that are obviously someone scouring the archives for email addresses. My email at work has received zero SPAM emails, because I refuse to use it for anything.
So the question is, what to do to stop receiving all of these SPAM emails? I know I have to start fresh and get new email addresses, however a couple of these I've had for so long I really can't just abandon them. So I would still need to maintain the old ones, but the new ones I would have to make sure not to post anywhere on the internet (my surrealization email used to be viewable on my website, now it's only viewable through my RSS feed). It's a shame the current situation email is in, I would love to simply make it all stop.
UPDATE:
Grouping up my emails by E-Mail account the email was received in (didn't know you could do that until just now) it turns out that my surrealization email address has only received 60 spams in the past 3 months. My squishyweb account has received 3832 and my Yahoo account 306. I'm really surprised that more bots haven't gone through this website and found my email address. Very interesting, my email address here is (was - I set mine to prive) on a page with a querystring and on squishyweb it's on a page with no querystring. Plus, my squishyweb email has been around for about 2 years longer, so that could be another reason.
I'd really love to start over and keep more detailed records of all of this and track dates and times and everything else to come up with some good advice on how to avoid SPAM from publicly posted email addresses, etc.
