Spam update

Looks like that forum invasion may have caused my spam count to skyrocket. Either that, or a recent bugzilla release.

I was offline for the weekend. To get an accurate count, I started by going into my Junk folder and marked everything “read”, and deleted any junk with a future date. Thunderbird automatically purged off junk mail older than a week. This left 481 items in my junk folder, about 96 per day, given that I hadn’t checked mail since Friday. Until recently, I was down to about 70 per day.

Between Friday evening about 7 pm and Monday at 10:15, I received 356 new pieces of email through toomuchblue. Of these, 188 (52%) were automatically recognized as junk, and I manually flagged another 84 (24%) as junk. At least three out of every four pieces of mail I receive is spam.

Out of these, at least 7 were future-dated. I can’t say exactly, because I don’t know when these emails were sent, nor from what timezone. (I could probably find out by reading the headers, but this is a curiosity, not a compulsion). My hunch is that about 50 of these were future dated. It’s possible some of the 356 emails were junk mail past-dated more than a week in the past. If so, Thunderbird purged them before I could count them.

I also received quite a bit of legitimate mail:

• 52 email notifications from various FreeBSD servers.
• Five from email lists
• Four from webservers of my clients
• Three marketing pieces from companies I’ve used in the past. (These are annoying, but not spam since I do business with them.)
• Two legitimate bill notices from companies I use.
• One baby picture from friends

That leaves 17 unaccounted for. I imagine these are probably more spam.

So in summary:

• I get a lot of mail.
• I’m up to about 108 pieces of spam a day.
• If you sent me an email and I haven’t answered yet, it’s just possible it got lost in the noise.
• Time to blackhole a few more addresses.