Comments on: Spamalot!

By: Jeff Johannsen

Jeff Johannsen — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:16:25 +0000

I’ve never gotten a piece of spam in either of my current email accounts. I used to get a ton in my old account(s), and I have guarded these two(both obtained about 18 months ago) with my life.

By: Karina

Karina — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:24:48 +0000

Didn’t work on my google page.

I’d say I get about 15/day.

By: Joshua (Site Owner)

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:24:38 +0000

Why the pop-up window?

To make people guess! Too annoying? Did it work in Bloglines (or whatever you use)?

By: Dave (Site Brother)

Dave (Site Brother) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:31:34 +0000

Your one day total is just slightly less than my thirty day total.

Why the pop-up window?

By: Petra

Petra — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:02:01 +0000

I think I should win this. I have six hundred fifty six in the last month for a (GM) account that I’ve opened but have NEVER used, posted anywhere, written from, received anything real to(except the obligatory welcome letter). It’s a pure guess based on my other web presence. Amazing, really.

Sorry for all the prepositions at the ends of sentences.

By: Joshua (Site Owner)

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:17:19 +0000

A few things:

1. Spam filters these days are good. Gmail’s filters trap well over 99% of the spam for me, with, I believe, very few false positives. If there is a false positive, though, I’m probably never going to see it, because I cannot realistically slog through [click the link] messages a day to find the needle in the haystack.

2. Yes, my email is out there to be slurped: on my site, on USENET, everywhere. I’ve had it forever, and I think tricks like joshuaREMOVETHIS@mcgees.org and encoding my email in an image file are either corny or unfair to the visually-handicapped. I see robots in my logs that announce, freely, that they are slurping for email addresses. Those are the “honest” ones. How much more traffic is from the “dishonest” ones (the line is indistinct), I do not know.

3. I have “catch-all” addresses for various domains set to forward to my Gmail account. So if there’s a big spam campaign, and the software is guessing email addresses (bob@mcgees.org, mary@mcgees.org, etc.) I will get all of those — unless they guess edwin, niall, or some other specifically-aliased one.

By: Bob Mike

Bob Mike — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:57:21 +0000

I would guess that, between my three email addresses, I receive between one and three spam emails on any given day. One of those email addresses I’ve had for eight years, and I have been very, very careless about entering it into contests or signing message boards with it.

What the Hell do you do with your email that you get that much spam?

By: Jordon

Jordon — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:29:54 +0000

Sheeze. How many? Between my two e-mail addresses, one spam per day is on the high side. Is your e-mail address out there to be slurped up by bots, or what? I try to prevent that from happening with mine, but I’m thinking that spam filters should be good enough these days that I shouldn’t have to.