In a conversation with a friend the other day the subject of email spam came up as he was lamenting the amounts of junk he had to filter through. That got me to thinking about my own spam situation, and I realized that I hadn’t looked at the statistics SpamSieve collects for me as it cleans my inbox for some time now.
So far, this year, I’ve had 66,453 spams, or an average of 484 per day. Extrapolated I should see about 168,000 spams this year. Since I installed the filter two-and-a-half years ago, I’ve had 284,895 spams. In the same time span I’ve had roughly 7000 emails that weren’t spam. In other words 2.45% of my mail is something I want to see. The other 97.55% is crap.
Wow.
If I had a nickel for every spam I’ve filtered in just over two years I’d have made $14,244.75.
Where’s my check?