Journal: News & Comment

If one of those spams should happen to fall...

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A few months ago I was getting 6 spam e-mails per hour. Now it's up to 9. My spam filter catches almost all of it. About 1% are false positives—not spam, but tagged as such. A few false negatives—spam, but not caught—slip through per day as well, but they're easy to delete.

Here's what that means: between last Wednesday and this morning, the filter nabbed more than 1000 (yes, one thousand) e-mail messages. About 10 weren't actually spam, and I had to retrieve them from the spam filter's database. I've also deleted several dozen spams that slipped past the filter.

If the rate stays the same instead of rising (I wish!), I'd receive 80,000 spam messages in the next year. Depending on their average size, that's between 250 and 500 megabytes of pure digital crap.

In the real world, by October 2004, it will be more crap than that.

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