Journal: News & Comment

A measure of the onslaught

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A couple of years ago I was dismayed when more than 50% of my e-mail was spam (and about how the problem arose). But back in 2002, that was still only 59 spam messages in three days. A year later, my spam rate had gone way up, and in fall 2003 I posted a troubling graph showing that the trend was way worse than I expected.

Now, to keep the tide at bay, I have three separate layers of spam filtering:

1. Pobox, my e-mail forwarding service since 1996, catches most spam in its first-level filter (over 1600 messages in the past nine days).
2. My ISP, Telus, gets a good chunk of the rest in its Brightmail-based filter.
3. My Mac at home runs Spamfire client filtering software, which works, but has its limitations and problems—I've reverted to version 1.45 from the current 1.51 because the latest ones are so unstable.

Yet some still gets through and I have to delete it myself. This morning there were nine spam messages left over after all my filters got through with them overnight.

I wonder how many layers I'll have next year? Or will I have given up on e-mail?

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