Just in case you were curious about the levels of spam I have to deal with daily. I have a filter running on my inbox that tracks how much mail I get each day, how much of that is list traffic, and how much of it is spam. Each night, the program (which is available here) generates a report that lets me see how things have been going.
I have many spam defenses running on boomer, and it does an admirable job of filtering out the spam. This week I’ve noticed a fair amount of the 3 line plain text spam getting through to me (which Thunderbird does catch). This spam is notoriously hard to filter due to it’s simplicity. I was sort of curious how much spam actually -was- getting caught.
Here’s my last 7 days of total mail I’m receiving:
Breakdown by day: (17606 posts, average of 2515.1 posts per day.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Feb 10 | Feb 9 | Feb 8 | Feb 7 | Feb 6 | Feb 5 | Feb 4 1983 | 1619 | 2636 | 2878 | 3020 | 2985 | 2485
That is the total mail received addressed to me on perhaps half a dozen domains. They all funnel to the same mailbox. How much of that is spam? Lets look:
Breakdown by day: (12676 posts, average of 1810.9 posts per day.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Feb 10 | Feb 9 | Feb 8 | Feb 7 | Feb 6 | Feb 5 | Feb 4 1656 | 1216 | 1918 | 1990 | 2135 | 2101 | 1660
An average of 1810 spams received each day. By one mailbox.
The spam report is showing ‘caught spam’. I get very few false positives (mail caught as spam and misfiled), so I have my filters set fairly liberal. Thunderbird is probably catching another 200 spam messages a day. The rest of my mail is list traffic (I’m on a dozen or so mailing lists). And what’s left? Legitimate mail, probably 25 messages a day.
One out of every hundred messages I receive, only one is something I need to pay immediate attention to.
Email is broken. It’s time to look at a radical paradigm change. I’ll be posting some more about this as I move ahead, but I constantly worry about situations where important mail may be missed, and it’s become abundantly clear that the current email situation has to change in order for net communication via electronic mail is to continue being a viable medium.
I didn’t realize until I checked my Boomer spam trap the other day just how much it was filtering out. No false positives either, that I could find. A fair amount gets through, but like you I use Thunderbird as a second line of defense.
So consider this a note of appreciation from a satisfied customer.
@chip
Ah! Thanks, that’s nice to hear 🙂
All of the ideas I’ve seen have revolved around somehow changing the way email works so that the costs of email are born by the sender. Currently, it’s the recipient who bears most of the cost of spam. (Mostly, this is .)
I’m not too affected by spam. Filters catch a lot of it, and I read a lot faster than most people, so I can usually, when spam evades filters, know it’s spam fairly quickly and delete it. I also stay away from HTML email, which, I think, helps evade any other problems I might get from spam.
Still, I would like it if I didn’t have to think about the problem at all.
I’ve seen proposals revolving around monetary cost (senders have to fork over some dough to recipients) and other kids of cost (email includes a ticket that allows the recipient to use some of your CPU for whatever..usually that’s somehow tied into grid computing, and the whole idea seems kind of sketchy to me, though I don’t know enough about the technology to say for sure). That will reduce the problem, but not eliminate it as the hordes of junk mail (which involve a monetary cost) attest.
I think some kind of scheme where the recipient determines how much emails sent to him cost, and can modify it for certain senders, will work best. If I specify that emails sent to me will cost the sender $100, and modify it so there is little or no charge for people I actually need to talk to, it will severely reduce the problem.