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[this is a public entry]
Over a year ago, I wrote a post about spam. Back then, I wrote:
Okay. So out of the 44 messages in my inbox as of this morning, 21 of them were spam. That's nearly 50%, people. *rolls eyes*Wanna guess what the percentage is now? How does 70% strike you?
It's true. I looked at my inbox using the webmail interface just now, which displays 100 emails per page. I then selected to delete the spam I could easily identify just by subject and sender. I was even a little generous - some of the emails which I had were most likely spam, but had a vague enough subject that I didn't delete them offhand - I like to give emails the benefit of the doubt when it comes to spam.
After that, I hit the button to delete those emails. When the next page came back, my inbox was apparently 70 emails less than before - I started with 890 emails in my inbox (don't worry, I *do* read the ones I need to), and ended with 820. So 70 out of 100 emails were spam. Probably more.
Of course, there are a number of things to take into account with these figures. The first is that I use different addresses for *everything*. This means that depending on the email addresses they find, I could be listed many tens of times on the same spam list - all going to the same inbox, although the people using the addresses don't know that. This isn't pure speculation either - no less than 9 of my email addresses at my domain got more or less the same spam for "Penis Enlarge Patch", all of which were included in the count above.
I do *not* put addresses willy-nilly into forms. I don't sign up for free "Joke of the Day" lists or other silly things like that. And I *do* have spam filters on my email client, although I'm thinking I might need to employ stronger spam filters on the server. I hate deleting mail automatically, but I may be forced to at some point. (On a side note, I just noticed that SpamAssassin isn't operating properly. GAH. I'll see what I can do about that later.)
So, yeah. Things are not good.
