How much spam do you get?
Spam, spam, spam…
I guess most of you, if not all, get an annoying amount of spam every day. After being fed up with offers to buy Viagra, get a larger penis or larger breasts or to make an investment in a company based in Nigeria and run by some heir and relative to the king, you install spam filters. With that you also get the fear of what you might miss out on, wondering if that important e-mail got through or if it contained a word like “sex” and got thrown away before you got to even see it.
As a counter-measure though, you still have to browse through the e-mails in the spam filter folder to at least make sure none of the e-mails from your actual friends/colleagues got stuck, so handling spam is in one way or another something necessary evil that you need to waste precious time on.
And if you want to be nice and start blogging, writing things for free to share with the world, the price you’ve got to pay if the blog gets even vaguely successful is having to deal with loads and loads of spam comments. Oh, joy to the world.
I was trying do some research to see if I could find any estimation of how many e-mails are sent each month, but to no avail. All I got was a sponsored link (that means ad) in Google, reading:
Email Advertising
Send 81 Million Emails Monthly
Highly Effective Spam Law Compliant
I think that that just gives an indication of how bad things are… 🙁
I truly wonder how this will affect our beloved information society, what the situation will be like in, say, 2010. Will spammers be gone, or have they taken over? For the moment, I get between 20-30 spam e-mails every day.
How much spam do you get?
Forum Spam at the moment usually one or two per week; E-mail Spam maybe 1 per month maximum.
Chello just updated their spam stuff, and now I am 99% spam free 🙂
I get around 1000 spam messages per day — after messages containing Windows executables have already been /dev/nulled on the server. SpamSieve filters the emails locally.
That's what happens when you've had your email address public for 10 years.
I get 5-10 spam mails every day but gmail filters those so I never see the spam! 🙂
It's all about not making the mail adress public, or if you really need to make your email public – use a mail scrambler like E-cloaker.
Actually I barely get any, since almost all of them are blocked by my hosting's spam filter. It looks to work really well, because I only very rarely get spam.
35-45 spam mails every day – the usual junk from the usual cretins. And that is what's left when the server SpamCop has filtered out most of the garbage. The rest goes directly to the junk bin, taken care of by my local filter. I have long since quit looking before I empty it. Approx once a week someone finds a new twist on things and some spam mails end up in my inbox, but after a couple of successful runs the filter learns how to deal with it and everything is back to normal again.
I get 5 or so a day to my Gmail, but they go straight to the Spam folder and very few make it to the inbox. Gmail is good at that.
My domain's email gets 2 a week.
Spam comments however. Oh boy. 20 to 30 a day. Akismet earns it's money though and gets all of them. None have gotten through since installing it.
5 or so a month. My ISP has excellent spam filters. The occassional one that does go through their filter is always caught by the filters in Thunderbird.
I've been getting more comment spam lately though, which is something I worry about a bit more.
I used to get none at all. When i switched hosts i noticed there was spam coming in suddenly. My new host has SpamAssasin and that is working great for me, and occasionally it let's one through. Apple's mail app usually catches it. And turning off my catch-all helped a lot, i guess i receive 2 or 3 messages a week on average.
@work it used to be around 1000 or more every day but our server filters it pretty good now so almost none gets through.
@gmail I have about > 50 per day … @home there is only a few, but thunderbird is really good at filtering stuff so it doesn't bother me.
Private email: 2-10 per day.
Work email: 10-50 per day.
I used to get as much as about 100/day but my new Web host/email server (with Spamassassin) has reduced it to about 5-10 per day. I also use a local spam checker called POPFile which also works great for me.
What troubles me is why my sons (11 and 13 yrs), who have never used their email address on any forums or public sites, get spam.
I get several spam emails per day. I just use Gmail to handle everything though, and found that it does a pretty good job of filtering everything. Rarely does any spam make it to the inbox, and I've never had a false positive, in which it flagged something as spam that was not. With their "Send As" feature, I can just send + recieve email from my own dot-com address via Gmail.
This just in!
News about an Anti-Spam Act in Australia.
On the program on KTH where I study I'm on the webdev team. The team has a public email adress that has been online (and clickable) since -96. When I first joined the situation was terrible, I'm talking 100+ spam mail a day. Then KTH installed SpamAssassin and let people filter their email themselves. That brought the number down to 2/day, a great program SpamAssassin is. Later KTH decided to also add "Grey listing" and that brought the number down to just a few per week. Now I use both of the above and the learning filter in Thunderbird. Try to spam me if you can 😉
My blog handles all the spam with Akismet, it's not fully configured yet, but it's getting better all the time.
SpamSieve has been a godsend to my inbox. Without it, I would still be getting 100+ messages a day. I have still yet to try a filter like Akismet, though with all the positive response, it might be the secret I need to stop using comment moderation as my means of spam control.
I wonder myself how much worse the spam problem will get. Unfortunately, it's seen as profitable, which creates incentive to spam. If email clients, for example, would stop turning links into clickable links, stop loading images, and return to pure text based email the incentive for clogging up an inbox would be gone. Thankfully 99% of all forum software prevents anonymous posting, otherwise we'd be up to our necks in forum spam by now.
I get a lot.. well no, I get none. Depends on the email address. I had my hotmail email account since the mid 90s, and used hotmail practically to sign up for anything iffy. Surely it gets a good chunk of spam but then again who doesn't get spam in their hotmail account? In any case, why do I care since the 'real' email that I want is not delivered there to begin with.
Enter gmail/yahoo, and personal site's email. I get a range from 0-10 in a given week on the public free emails, and on my domain I get none. Yes, practically none. Simply, I do not give this email out to anyone other then who I believe to be 'safe'. I have however received spam in rare cases, but nothing to worry about.
I have also setup a blackhole for any address other then my main email address; meaning I only get the emails that are specifically written to my info@ address, and everything else gets vanished. For some, catchall may be necessary, however I do not find this to be true in my case.
What about mentioning my email on my site? I currently allow the users to contact me either via form, or I simply provide my email using CSS unicode-bidi `direction:rtl`. Seems to do the trick so far, or perhaps I am not that popular for the spammers? Then again it has been around at least a few years.
I wrote an article which contains a compilation of different methods to hide email addresses from harvesters, which may interest some of you.
Even still, I find it surprising to see that I barely get any spam on my info@ since it is a very generic/common email address.
Thanks everyone, interesting to hear!
To describe my situation, I mainly use GMail and it does a very good job of stopping/filtering spam that I can later review.
I guess something I should've asked everyone that's happy with their spam filtering if they're sure that everything that's supposed to get through actually does it, and doesn't just get weeded out with all the spam e-mails…
I use several email-accounts. Combined I guess I get 25 to 40 spammessages per day, mainly about penis-enlargement and stuff like that. Don't ask me why, I don't need it! 😉
I do also use Gmail and I also am quite impressed by its spamfilter. It indeed works pretty good!
I currently receive about 7.000 e-mails a month, 3.200 of them being spam (GMX shows me exactly how many e-mails have been checked for viruses – it checks all e-mails -, and my spam folder tells me the rest). Albeit spam protection works very well, I do not know the time spam handling costs me, though. I don’t even want to.
Tim,
Yes, for some reason, it''s always penis-emlargement e-mails… 🙂
Jens,
Long time, no comment (I think)!
That sounds like a lot of e-mails! Also, I agree: I don't want to know what spam handling costs the world.
But I'm always there 😉
Jens,
Ah, good. Then I feel ok again! 🙂
40 mails in gmail account (quite new)
100 mail in old account (with no spam protection..)
baldo,
Thanks for sharing.
Ah, by the way, part 1, some weeks ago I tried and can now definitely recommend Blue Security's anti spam measures – currently, I only receive about a quarter of the spam I received before! (Without missing anything, of course ;))
And by the way, part 2, why're you not not naked today?
Jens,
Congrats!
And nah, I'm not interested in that naked stuff… 🙂
i want phpmailer plzzzzzzzzz
Please spam me: lcaron@lncsa.com
i get too little spam, get me some offers please
odysseybmx@volny.cz lukerr@volny.cz odysseybmx@volny.cz lukerr@volny.cz odysseybmx@volny.cz lukerr@volny.cz
petraco@yahoo.com
please email me
I hadn't checked my main, private email address for a couple of months atleast and I finally popped open ThunderBird a couple of days ago to take a peak at what emails I had received in this time.
I pretty much fell off my chair when it said "receiving 211 new messages". This was a very private email address, hardly anyone knew of it nor used it. Yet in a couple of months, 211 messages had been sent to it. Only about 5-10 of them were actually meaningful messages; the rest were just similar to your examples – offers to buy Viagra, get a larger penis or larger breasts or to make an investment in a company based in Nigeria and run by some heir and relative to the king.
Which surprised me even more that some of them were even using 'duste' or 'duste[at]duste[dot]net' as their name. Damn, spammers sure are getting smart; trying to trick people into thinking they're real messages by using the person's own name/email. Obviously the person is going to realise that it's spam if they don't remember ever sending the messages. I mean seriously, lol.
Hayden,
Yeah, it sure sucks; they seem to be able to get to you anywhere…
spam me please?
spam@ricoh.entadsl.com
spam@ricoh.entadsl.com
spam@ricoh.entadsl.com
spam@ricoh.entadsl.com
spam@ricoh.entadsl.com
Great discussion!
franz.barrow@mail.com
I agree very interesting discussing, my spam filter blocks nearly all so I don't have to worry (much)
Regards,
lima2002@inbox.com
I love spam, actually I'm trying to get more of it! So, here are some email addresses of mine:-
cwtestuser2@hotmail.co.uk
cwtestuser3@hotmail.co.uk
fraserhend@googlemail.com
cwtestuser@lycos.co.uk
cwtest2@yahoo.co.uk
fraserhenderson@fsmail.net
hendersonok222@aol.co.uk
fraser.henderson@tiscali.co.uk
I really hope this will get noticed by those lovely spammers!
spam me at tony@riddler.co.uk
do your best losers.
Not much. Hoping for more.
rcooks@comcast.net
I get very annoying Spam asking 'want a bigger penis', Em hang on a bit here I'm a female! I know I desire em but I prefer smallish one's. What I would like to know is how to stop the spam all together. You know what its like, spammers rarely give you a 'don't send more' opt out thingy.
Just how do they get our Email addresses? I'm wondering cos my most of my pals always get the 'da ya want to have hu-uuge nasty breasts' Sprácensi? type spam. I guess is cos I am a techy with links to microsoft etc, where most are surprised to find a woman.
Jazz,
My guess is that they make no distinction, but just send it to about any e-mail address they can get their hands on.
10 a day to this address: milank@posta.upol.cz
PLEASE SPAM ME
jeanlouis.pouget@orange-ftgroup.com
Please spam me. I beg you
spammaster92@gmail.com
Please do not spank me!
Spam this please
therealdjwick@gmail.com
i get too little spam, get me some offers please
doubledo@freemail.hu
i need spam
test@kiss.hopto.org
i need spam for testing
e.gladkova@eurocem.ru
Spam me please
E.Gladkova@eurocem.ru
E.Gladkova@eurocement.ru
Gladkova@eurocem.ru
Gladkova@eurocement.ru
E.Gladkova@eurocem.com
Gladkova@eurocem.com
E.Gladkova@eurocem.com.ua
Gladkova@eurocem.com.ua
E.Gladkova@eurocem.ua
Gladkova@eurocem.ua
E.Gladkova@eurocement.com.ua
Gladkova@eurocement.com.ua
E.Gladkova@eurocement.ua
Gladkova@eurocement.ua
E.Gladkova@eurocement.com
Gladkova@eurocement.com
E.Gladkova@evrocem.ru
E.Gladkova@evrocement.ru
Gladkova@evrocem.ru
Gladkova@evrocement.ru
E.Gladkova@evrocem.com
Gladkova@evrocem.com
E.Gladkova@evrocem.com.ua
Gladkova@evrocem.com.ua
E.Gladkova@evrocem.ua
Gladkova@evrocem.ua
E.Gladkova@evrocement.com.ua
Gladkova@evrocement.com.ua
E.Gladkova@evrocement.ua
Gladkova@evrocement.ua
E.Gladkova@evrocement.com
Gladkova@evrocement.com
Spam me please
smm@eurocem.ru
pss@eurocem.ru
Spam me please
egd@eurocem.ru
edg@eurocem.ru
gde@eurocem.ru
ged@eurocem.ru
deg@eurocem.ru
dge@eurocem.ru
peterki@pk.korbitec.com
On Gmail about 10-20 a day, with 600 at all times in my spam folder since I don’t bother emptying it. Mostly from the same folks in China.
I haven’t used my earthlink account in a while but at one point it was getting 20-30 a minute. I think I made someone’s hate list.
—
macadamtosh@earthlink.net
info@targetslocated.co.uk
Hell a lot more than you can handle nowadays
a friend have an e-mail-accout by gmx and pay for it and I use the free-e-mal-account by gmx and got lesser spam mail. I don´t know why but I´m happy 😉
do your best spammers
my imac gets em all 🙂
jr@vianet.ca