Learning to Swim While Drowning in Spam
I already knew I got a lot of spam, probably more than many since I have multiple email accounts, manage domains that default to my email, and have recklessly shared my own email address online for many years. But back in October, I decided to check just how much. So for a week, I saved my spam and counted it. During the week of October 2-8, I received 3,129 spam email messages, an average of 447 each day. Among the top subject lines were:Re: HI, Need medicine? All here!, We cure any disease!, Full of health? Then don’t click!, and Our store is your cureall!
And it could have ended there, a sad peek into the ugly wasteland that email has become. But no, it got worse, I could just tell. And so later the same month I repeated the same spam counting experiment. And during the week of October 23 – 29 I received 5009 spam emails for an average of 715 a day. Please, can I get a sympathetic WTF here??!!
At the end of my rope, I finally took steps that I had long resisted in order to stem the flow by signing up with Spam Arrest, a spam filtering service. I had heard good reviews from a few people, but was still hesitant to put anything between me and my email. Now I only regret having waited so long.
Sometimes a simple technology change can be a real lifestyle change. Caller ID, and Tivo are a couple of examples. Add Spam Arrest to that list. For the first time, I feel like I’m fighting back and maybe even have the upper hand in the fight against spam. Ninety-one percent of my email is spam! It’s sad that so much time and effort has to be wasted because of these lowlife email hucksters. It’s sadder still that there must be more than enough suckers in the world who respond to their crap that spam is a viable business at all.
It’s a big problem, and getting worse. Thank you Spam Arrest for giving me a way to fight back.
For further reading…
What’s with all this spam?
Network World, 11/8/06
‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders
eWeek, 11/16/06
‘9 out of 10 e-mails now spam’
CNN.com, 11/27/06
Spam Doubles, Finding New Ways to Deliver Itself
The New York Times, 12/6/06