Comments on: You’ve got to appreciate truth in advertising

By: Martin McKeay

Martin McKeay — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:45:04 +0000

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.

By: kurt wismer

kurt wismer — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:28:06 +0000

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…

By: Wade M

Wade M — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:45:25 +0000

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

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 19:43:26 +0000

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.