Spam Experiment



I recently started a spam experiment. I currently use a free email account from a pretty big company that is associated with searching. One of the nice things about this email client is that it allows you to capture email from numerous accounts besides just theirs. So I get email addressed to my accounts from my employer, my small company, my cable company and my primary account along with a few aliases that I've set up. I've had some of these accounts for a while and I've registered on a variety of websites over the years. So I get a lot of spam. The spam filter is pretty good and so most goes in the spam box. The only mail that slips through that I shouldn't get is the stuff where somebody types in the wrong email address. I've written about this on occasion. I usually empty the spam box a couple of times a day with a quick scan first to make sure nothing important shows up there. I did this because I just didn't like the spam in my mail client. It made me feel icky.

Recently, I decided to see what happened if I let it just accumulate. My email account keeps it for 30 days and then tosses it. After 30 days, the amount of spam should reach some steady state and I can watch and tell if there is a spam surge or spam drop by following the total. They say that most of the spam comes from just a few places and if a spammer is shut down, there is a global drop in the amount of spam that one gets. Word is that spam and porn are using about 60% of the internet bandwidth, with spam using about 85% of the email traffic.

I've been doing this for 16 days so far. At midnight, I had 1038 spams which works out to 64.875 spams a day. So I'm on track to reach somewhere around 2000 spams at steady state. I'll let you know when I reach steady-state.

As I was typing this, a question arose in my mind. Should I be talking about "spams" or "pieces of spam." In other words, does the word "spam" describe an individual piece of email or does it describe the entire body of work. If you're down on your luck and eating cheaply, you don't ask for another spam, you ask for another piece of spam. Or not. Anyhow, I leave you with this: