The BradLands: Must See HTTP://

Friday, January 2, 2004

Spam und drang: 136,235

At the stroke of midnight, the grand total was 136,235 unsolicited, commercial e-mail messages received on one account (my primary personal e-mail address) in one calendar year, 2003. That's 566,795K of worthless e-mail and wasted bandwidth. Not one of those messages advertised a product or service in which I was even remotely interested; hell, most of them didn't even make any sense, just strings of gibberish, random words and numbers.

By the end of December, I was receiving about 700 spam messages every day.

If I spent just one second scanning the subject line of each message and deleting it, that means I spent roughly 37.8 hours in 2003 dealing with garbage e-mail. Almost a full work week! I suspect I spent somewhat more than that, actually.

And if I'd kept track of all the crap messages received on all of the e-mail addresses I administer, for both work and personal projects, those numbers would be staggeringly higher. If I added in all of the spam that's sent everyday to non-existent addresses at my domains, you could multiply the total by a factor of 10. If I added in the bounced messages that come back to me because some unscrupulous spammer (and how's that for redundant?) spoofed my domain when sending out their shitty missives, you could count on another 20,000-30,000 messages.

What does it all mean? It means the noise is way, way, way outshouting the signal. It means that legitimate mass e-mail (say, newsletters my theatre subscribers have double opt-in requested) is automatically rejected as spam. It means that I can no longer send e-mail from bradlands.com to my friends with AOL or Road Runner accounts because those companies have gotten dozens of complaints of spam coming from my domain.

It means e-mail is broken, perhaps irreparably so.

A reminder: I'm taking measures -- short-term solutions, perhaps -- to personally opt out of the spam und drang. I have a new private personal e-mail address. If you're in my address book, you should have already received my particulars (except if you're using AOL or Road Runner). If you didn't, no hard feelings. I'm just trying to keep my e-mail safe and myself somewhat sane.

Beginning January 31, all mail to the old address -- nearly six years old -- will begin bouncing. Correspondence will also be accepted through a simple feedback form on this website, location to be announced shortly.

Posted by Brad on January 2, 2004 at 3:35 PM | (4)

Spam

Comments:

Six years ago, I put up a website that included, in plaintext and mailto form, the email address mail-at-my-domain. Spam grew with the general trend, and a few years ago I sacrificed mail@ to the wolves (complete block of mail to that address). The result: almost *no* spam. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it.

I've since adopted the yourname-at-my-domain strategy of filling out forms, so I could track sources of any future spam. So far, I haven't caught anyone infringing on their privacy policy. A Baysean filter routes other possible spam to a junk folder, which catches random-at-my-domain spams (that have been surprisingly sparse recently). The spammer-using-my-domain-in-From bounce messages only started a couple of months ago for me, they're still a problem.

I don't know if I'm just lucky, or what. I tend to enter contests with a Hotmail address I reserve for that purpose, which of course gets almost nothing but spam (though I doubt that has anything to do with the contests). Even Hotmail spam filters are improving. I hope they haven't filtered out any of my contest prize claim forms...

Comment by BrainDan on January 6, 2004 at 12:09 PM

P.S. Your comment form displays email addresses raw. The conclusion to draw from my experience above (as others have drawn) is that putting an email address on a web page is one of the easiest ways to sign it up for spam.

Comment by BrainDan on January 6, 2004 at 12:12 PM

Yes, I'm not pleased with the fact that e-mail addresses on BradLands comments are basically unprotected. As I understand it, there are some Movable Type add-ons available to encode them or obscure them, but I haven't had time to investigate them.

Comment by TheBrad on January 6, 2004 at 3:52 PM

Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful

Comment by taylor on May 25, 2004 at 4:46 PM