Spam Count: 44,645

Spam Year Continues: As of this writing, the 2003 Spam Count has reached 44,645, which is significant only because it's just about where I thought it would be...at the end of the year.

When I decided, on a whim, to keep track of all the unsolicited, commercial e-mail I received this year, I estimated that on December 31, 2003, I'd wind up with about 45,000 spam messages, a guess borne out when by the middle of January, I was receiving an average of 118 spams each day. What a difference a few months make! We're 200 days in, over half the year past, and by the current count, I'm receiving an average of 222 spam messages each day.

On one hand, that's appalling. On another, it's perversely fascinating, watching number grow day by day. But one thing is clear, and was even before I began this little project: spam is out of control. Even though SpamAssassin catches nearly everything that isn't a valid e-mail message and shunts it into a separate folder so I can peruse it from time to time and even though I have a private, "unlisted" e-mail address for vital messages and family members, the amount of junk that passes through my server is intolerable.

I've hardly even got the worst of it. Last week, Lance told me he was receiving 3,000 spam messages per day. (It's a little apples-to-oranges, since Lance is trapping spam to every address at his domain, while I'm only counting mail to my primary address, but still!)

For the sake of the project, I'll be tolerating and counting spam for another few months but, come January 1, 2004, I'll start playing hardball in a couple of new ways, not least of which will be completely abandoning the e-mail address I've had for 5+ years. Until then, I'll be making guesses about what the year-end total winds up to be. My current bet is on an even 100,000.

Further: Within 30 seconds of posting this entry, another 31 spam messages arrived. And the beat goes on...

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