August Spam
Sep 5th, 2003 by mark
I just cleaned out my spam folder by exporting all the August dated spams, a total of 4,917 messages. This brings my annual total to 42,702 spams for the year. In August my daily average slipped to a mere 158 spams a day. For the year my average is 175 spams a day.
175 a day sounds bad until you read about the man who gets 3,000 spams a day.
I’m thinking about trying knowspam.net again. I used it for a few days earlier this summer but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to accept a new paradigm for dealing with these messages. Currently I scan the list of spams that my rule set tosses into the spam folder for any false positives. For me, anyway, using a service like knowspam requires that I only skim the spam folder when I think I’m missing something.
When the spam folder is local to my machine I don’t worry about losing something to my spam rules. Even if I do have a false positive I still have the e-mail, it’s just filed in the wrong folder. With knowspam my false positives would be online somewhere, they’d be out of my control.
I suppose I should examine the incoming spam for a time and determine just how many false positives I really get. This summer as I was entertaining the idea of switching jobs I got a fair number of e-mails from unknown senders, which I treat as spam, that I actually wanted to have in my inbox. Now that I have made my monster and dice resume inactive I suppose I don’t have to worry about that kind of e-mail for a time.
All of this sounds like another case where I am making a mountain out of a mole hill. If I can figure out why I am obsessed with the fear of losing even one e-mail to a spam filter, then maybe I can relax enough to allow a service like knowspam to work for me.
Until then, I’ll be spending some time everyday buried in the latest pile of crap in my spam folder.
Sigh.
