Fri 23 Dec 2005
A few years ago I wanted to write a post about how much SPAM I get. Sure, everybody gets a whole bunch of SPAM. Depending on the source you hear from, the average person gets 8 to 13.3 junk emails a day. Depending on the number of legitimate emails one receives, that’s a high percentage of total emails that’s junk.
Now the number of SPAMmy emails I receive is getting absurd. To be honest, I receive every email that’s sent to my domain regardless of whether it has a POP3 account associated with it, because I tend to use email pseudonyms when I register online (e.g. aa@nachoworld.com or crazymonk@nachoworld.com). Pseudonyms work quite well in cases where the evil corporation (American Airlines or crazymonk.org) decides to sell my address. I’ve caught a few unethical email sellers (I get some non-Morpheus related junkmail through musiccity@nachoworld.com) this way. However, even if I did simply get rid of my ‘catchall’ within the nachoworld.com domain, I would still be inundated. Sometimes spiders grab my Tufts email address from the public directory posted at directory.tufts.edu - I have never put my Tufts address into a web form. (Impressively there have been spiders that grab just Indian names from school directories in Boston and New York in order to send Indian party junkmail.)
When I used Eudora, I created a number of filters on my desktop client that deleted those SPAMful nachoworld.com email address messages as they came. The program also had a statistics generator which could tell me how many total emails I was receiving and the projected number for the year. I used to be impressed with that projected number. The problem was that the projected number for the year would rise every month. Now I use the full version of Outlook because it’s faster, but even now after I wake up and “check email” it takes a few minutes for the program to filter.
Now I pose this question to you guys. How many junk messages do I receive a day. I can guarantee no one will come close to guessing the correct number.

December 23rd, 2005 at 2:48 pm
You really should filter out most/much of that email at the server. I use the same domain name trick as you, and every new domain gets a new email address (morpheus and some other file sharing program around that time both sold me out, bastards). I’ve moved away from using any email address that’s available online, and I block all the old favorites at teh server so I never see them: brian, webmaster, rumors, submit, and a few others. I have no way of seeing how many emails this blocks, but brian was a very public email address a few years ago, and it used to get a ton of spam.
Then I use gmail, and they filter out a good amount of the spam as well. They block about 10 to 15 emails a day (and looking at them now, it appears that my blocking emails at the server approach is failing because there’s a good number of brian, rumors, and webmaster emails coming through). Oh well.
I’d recommend using gmail, their filter is pretty good… and after a few months they never incorrectly classify anything as spam anymore. They’re good at correcting their mistakes if you point them out.
I’ll be you get 50 a day.
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Good guess, but not close.
Today I’ve started blocking a few email addresses at the server level such as the old nkankana@emerald.tufts.edu and nacho@nachoworld.com. I’m running into the problem of SPAMmers sending out emails to made up address like murriel@nachoworld.com and morrie-tomahawk@nachoworld.com. How exactly do they expect to get a hit at colacavio@nachoworld.com? There’s about 50-60 such email addresses and the way the interface for the hosted server works, it will take about 30 seconds per email to block. I just don’t want to spend a devoted half hour clicking and typing for this nonsense.
Any other guesses?
December 23rd, 2005 at 9:25 pm
I’d guess around 630 a day.
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:45 pm
Side note: colacavio@nachoworld.com seemed to get to you just fine. You shouldn’t knock the spammers’ tactics when they’re effective.
December 24th, 2005 at 2:35 am
Crazymonk is some sort of psychic. I get between 600 and 650 a day for about 230,000 SPAM messages a year. I predict 375,000 junkmails for the year 2006. I would never have predicted in college that in a few short years I would personally receive a quarter million emails a year.
You’re right DoorFrame, but almost all corporate domains and most personal domains /dev/null emails to addresses that don’t have real mailboxes (no ‘catchall’s). We just happen to be the exceptions.
December 24th, 2005 at 5:10 pm
Wow, maybe ABobek decided to get revenge? I honestly don’t understand why you get so many more emails than I do. It’s not like my domain didn’t have prominent public email addresses, and it’s not like I didn’t have a well publicized and linked-to domain. It seems like I should have been harvested just as much as you during the college years.
I miss signing abobek up for stuff.
January 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
More content!
January 24th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
I’m up to 1100 emails/day.
I miss abobek@emerald.tufts.edu too.
January 24th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
abobek@emerald.tufts.edu ROCKED.
January 26th, 2006 at 12:03 am
January 26th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Ahh… this picture reminds me of your blog for absolutely no reason that I can pin down.
I don’t know.
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