According to a recent report about email and spam, you never see 95 percent of the electronic messages sent to you. That’s because they’re spam and have been effectively filtered by your ISP.
Aside from a recent spate of porn spam, the general amount of useless email I get in my inbox has been declining rapidly over the years. In fact, I would say that most days I don’t receive any spam email at all. That’s just great!
Contrast the situation today with how things looked a few years back. Damn! Spam was a problem: Offers for pharmaceuticals, porn, mortgage refinancing, free this and that. It was hell.
The peaceful silence doesn’t mean that the spam has stopped. Rather, it means that the Good Guys have become quite effective at halting the spam bloat before it finds its way into your email inbox.
Quite effective means that you’re only getting 5 percent of the email that’s being sent to you.
ISPs rely on you to report spam problems. That works because you’re probably not the only one receiving spam. Then the ISP investigates who is sending the spam. They’ll try contacting the host and getting them to stop. If that doesn’t work, they’ll block the host’s email (all of it), and potentially add the host to a blacklist so that other ISPs will do the same.
The end result of diligent ISPs working on the spam problem is that you don’t receive as much spam in your inbox.
There’s also a weird side issue when it comes to spam. Honestly, when you pay your ISP for an email account, you’re really entitled to get all the messages sent to you, including spam. So it’s kind of a welcome type of censorship that you agree with the ISP’s filtering.
It would be interesting if there were an opt-out method for disregarding an ISP’s spam filtering efforts. Then again, the though of the volume of unbridled e-crap floating into my inbox every day is a bit much.
My Gmail account captures a lot of spam, and not once has a spam email gotten through. Apparently I’m into high fashion now. It also seems to label messages from eBay as spam. Granted, they’re not the kind I generally read (usually like free insertion, blahblahblah), so maybe they’re doing me a favour. I just have to remember to go in and check the account manually.
My mother not two days ago got about fifty copies of the same spam email message from someone. I’d disabled server side spam filtering on all the accounts from our ISP as we had spam software on the computer, but the software only applied it’s name to the subject and downloaded it. I am now considering enabling server-side spam filtering for us again.
Comment by Douglas — January 25, 2010 @ 5:25 am
I don’t know if my unwanted email is spam or whether someone is just funning with me by signing me up for strange services. I simply unsubscribe from the weird ones. Good point about the GMail spam. I think my GMail account has like 600 messages in the spam folder.
Comment by admin — January 25, 2010 @ 6:51 am
GMail also seems to be good about keeping spam down, though I’ve had it filter messages from a legit forum into the spam folder. Not to worry as I can just create a filter to keep them out of spam.
Offtopic:
Did you know that Whole Wheat Corn Goobers now have 11 vitamins and minerals? They include Iron, Zinc, Paladium and Pentium.
(yes, i’m reading DOS For Dummies again)
Comment by linuxlove — January 25, 2010 @ 9:55 am
Ha! I was such a nut when I wrote that book. Also, my hat’s off to the publisher for allowing me to keep such zany stuff in the original DOS For Dummies.
Comment by admin — January 25, 2010 @ 1:09 pm
Yeah, especially the part about changing diapers 😛
Comment by linuxlove — January 25, 2010 @ 2:09 pm