Monday, February 23, 2009

Spam - A good result

I have always been very wary of ever giving out my real email address.

Because of a niggling issue with my main email service provider I have, however, been receiving unnecessarily large amounts of spam for the last couple of years.

By a combination of judiciously using auto-forwards, Googlemail and Mailwasher software, the problem has been under control. To the extent that it generally takes me no longer than a few seconds each day to deal with the issue.

Last week my email host moved me to a new server. Hey presto! They seem to have solved the aforementioned technical problem and their inbuilt spam filters seem at last to be doing their proper job. From the above graph, you can clearly see when the new server went live.

I know that the figures make it look as though I am a Billy-No-Mates, but I am quite happy to receive a small number of genuine personal emails per day, dealing as I do with dozens and dozens at work. All my mailing lists, blog comments etc go elsewhere.

Yes it's a small thing, but receiving no spam gives me a good feeling.

1 comment:

James (UK) said...

I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft were working on an email system where-by the sending PC had to "solve" a maths problem before sending each email, thus introducing a "delay" in sending... no real issue for me and you sending just one or two emails a day, but where spammers would email millions every few minutes, it really looked possible to stem the flow.

I've not read anything about it since, though...