Jul 16 2007
You’ve got to appreciate truth in advertising
I use Gmail as my central email repository and usually the spam filters they use are pretty good. But lately they’ve been a little overly aggressive, so I have to comb through to make sure no legitimate email is being caught accidentally. There’s not a lot that’s misidentified, but there’s enough to make it worth the few minutes a day it takes to double-check the spam folder.
I’ve been amazed at some of the subject lines I see, as well as what I see in the preview of the email. There’s no way I’m going to click on any of them to find out what else is in the spam, because it’s just not worth the risk. But I do have to say that my favorite subject line so far is “Thanks for contributing to our financial success”. It’s honest and straight forward even if it is just an attempt to rip off people around the globe.
On a side note, I used to clean out my spam folder every couple of days, but in March I started letting them accumulate and get deleted automatically when they’ve aged 30 days. It’s been interesting watching the number of spams spike and drop. At one point I had gathered nearly 9000 spams in a 30 day period, which works out to an average of 300 spams a day. Personally, that means about 60% of my email is spam, a far lower percentage of spam than most people see. I guess being subscribed to ten or so mailing lists had to have some benefit.
Mine is just a single data point, compared to the millions some anti-spam vendors get to see. But I like having a personal high water mark to compare to what the vendors are reporting. I’m not a spam expert, so it’s interesting to see new spam subjects that companies like F-secure report. Anyone else out there keep track of the spam they receive for fun?
Technorati Tags: security, spam, McKeay
Thanks for pointing that out. I checked my Gmail spam folder and found a few false positives. The last time I checked it wasn’t flagging any legit messages, so I stopped checking.
I get about 700 spams over the 30 days. I also was deleting them on a regular basis and then I thought, why am I doing this, Google will delete them for me.
I would say 20+ spams a day is probably about 60-70% spam.
When I first started using Gmail it was probably in the single digits. I give my real gmail address out to almost no one, but the spam started picking up. I assume they are sending to every possible combination@gmail.com.
I’ve been tracking my spam with gmail since I first got it back in 2004.
Back then it was around 12,000/month. It’s slowly grown to 22,824/month (as of today).
Peaks and troughs see it sitting around 28-30k during the peaks, and troughs of around 17-19k.
It would be interesting to setup a few honeypot e-mail address, to attract spam, then develop some central metrics to analyze the global spam situation…
–Wade
wow guys, those are some incredible numbers… i don’t know what you’re doing but my gmail address (which i’ve also had since 2004) is still spam free - even the spam ‘folder’ remains empty…
they’re definitely NOT trying every combination of gmail address…
I have multiple email addresses that I’ve posted on the web over time, such as contact information on blog and on the Computerworld site. So it comes as no surprise to me that I’m getting so much spam. One thing I haven’t done yet is analyze the emails to discover which of the addresses is getting the most spam. Since that’d takes real work, don’t expect me to try any time real soon.