Spam is way up

Ran a quick spam check to see what I am getting in my own personal e-mail, and at this point, I average about 50 spam messages a day at Google mail. Not too bad, but what is it made up of? The numbers surprised me.

About 50% of it was for meds, about 25% of it was for look at my video, e-card known spam to malware routes, and the other 25% (here is the surprising part) was stuff that I have spent months trying to disengage from, these are sites I subscribed to ages ago, tried to stop the e-mail from them, and they ignored the “please remove me from your e-mail list” or sites that rotate who they send from to make sure they defeat the spam designation, which is a spam tactic.

There have been some calls for a national do not e-mail me registry, even the FTC has a PDF on the subject. While we will regularly cull the e-mail box and randomly dump stuff that we are not interested in, the do not mail registry poses some interesting ideas. It will be very hard to make it work, as well it will be a great way to gather a pile of e-mail addresses tied to real people.

In the mean time, I have some 1900 spam messages in the last two weeks, which far outstrips the 10 e-mails I get a day (140 in comparison). The number is a bit less than national statistics of 95% of all e-mail in the system being spam, I guess I should be happy.

Keywords: spam, e-mail, do not email registry, numbers, whine