Blogitis: Spam Boxing Day
In Canada, the day after Christmas is "Boxing Day" []. No, it doesn't have anything to do with the people punching each other, and it also doesn't mean that people are "boxing up" the trash left over from Christmas. But both descriptions fit the task before me today.
Today I trade my blogging time in, on a most unpleasant task... searching through my Spam and Junk Email folders from 2007, trying to find any important emails that may have slipped through the cracks. Being very public on the web, and owning a number of domain names, I get a lot of spam, despite attempts to reduce it from both my mail servers and various tricks on web pages to stop the harvesters.
Still, most of the spam does get filtered, which is good, and only a few legitimate emails get lost... I think, we'll find out later today. To me, however horrible this method, it beats subscribing to one of those services by which people reaching you have to sign up to email you (talk about lost mail!).
In any case, here are the stats for 2007 for my AccuWeather email boxes:
SENT: 8,912
RECEIVED: 9,618
RECEIVED (AUTO)*: 29,041
RECEIVED (SPAM): 21,650
Compared to last year, I'm both sending and receiving more emails (numbers which had fell from 2005 to 2006), and Spam has increased by 33%. The number of Auto emails* has increased by 10,000 for the second year in a row.
Like I said back in 2005 though, "Still, it's got to beat being in meetings all day or combing through voice mails, which I guess is what people did before email (my first job was at an Internet Service Provider so I've always lived with it)."
Now, unfortunately, I have another 20,000 spams at home as well, so the next few hours are going to be brutal. But, I'll be rewarding myself with dinner and a movie afterwards. I may blog again later this evening, or I may be simply rendered blind by spam. In any case, wish me luck...
*Auto emails refers to automatic emails sent by computers, which are sent as notification of weather alerts, system stats, client or system changes, failures, etc. - in theory I don't have to "read" each one of these every day.
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