Spam
I've owned this domain name and associated email addresses for over five years now and in that time countless people and organisations have used my email address for correspondence. Back when the site was first on-line, it was very rare to receive any spam but over the past couple of years the amount that I recieve has increased dramatically.
I really hate spam. I mean really, really hate. If you are a spammer reading this, please kill yourself. And if you're one of this marketing suits that thinks its vital to get your message out to every customer you're ever had, especially if they've carefully unticked every box regarding "product notifications" - kill yourself, with a hammer. You're scum. There are tons of big name companies that send unsolicited email every chance they get, I'm not going to list them here because they have lawyers but I'm not going to buy anything from them ever again, either.
I've tried all sorts of things in an attempt to stop my in-box being clogged up, including running my own email server coupled with Bayesian filters like SpamAssassin which was quite effective but it was a lot of work to keep the rules up to date and check for false positives, especially since I typically receive less than a hundred emails a day.
GMail
At the start of this year, I decided to use Google's Gmail for my email after an online acquaintance was kind enough to give me an invite. I have loads of invites to give away, if you want one just add a comment in this thread. I chose to use a web based email service for several reasons:
- Google's service should be more reliable than my ISP (which is actually pretty good, but not perfect).
- Sometimes I have to work away from home, so being able to pick up my messages from anywhere is quite useful.
- The Google technicians should be better than I am at blocking spam.
Anyway, I decided to see whether using Gmail has made any difference to the amount of spam I receive, so I have kept a track of how many spam emails I've received since using the service. This does not really have any statistical validity because I would have to also check how many non-spam emails I receive each day, how many false negatives and false positives etc. Which I really con't be bothered to do. It started off as a reason to regularly check for false positives, but has turned into a bit of an obsession. Maybe someone will find it useful, or interesting.
Incidentally, I can tell you how many false positives (messages incorrectly flagged as spam) have been returned by Gmail - two. That's it, just two. Both of these were sent by the same hotmail account, and were pretty badly spelled. Since telling Gmail that these were not spam, the sender's messages are not flagged as spam. I consider this to be pretty good going, I would get many more false positives than this when running my own filters.
As for false negatives, I probably get 1 or two per day. That's not so bad, it's easy to filter the noise from the signal when I only have to deal with a small amount of garbage.
There was a huge spike in the number of spams recieved on 19th January 2006 when a Ukrainian spammer decided to use one of my email addresses in the "Sender" field of his odious output. This meant I recieved around 200 "delivery failed" messages on that day alone. What a scumbag.
Results
I'm sure you're really anxious to see whether using Gmail has noticeably reduced the amount of spam I receive, well here's
the graph:
| Max | 202 |
| Min | 6 |
| Avg | 24.74788 |
| Std Dev | 13.66841 |
As you can see, that Ukrainian scumbag really skewed my results. Other than that, it's not really changed a bit. What a waste of time, I'll still be counting spams though and might even update this page in a few months. Won't that be exciting!
Check out how Gmail's spam filter works.