Comment by ToucanLoucan
Comment by ToucanLoucan 2 days ago
> but spammers mostly lost that arms race
I'm not saying this is impossible but that's going to be an uphill sell for me as a concept. According to some quick stats I checked I'm getting roughly 600 emails per day, about 550 of which go directly to spam filtering, and of the remaining 50, I'd say about 6 are actually emails I want to be receiving. That's an impressive amount overall for whoever built this particular filter, but it's also still a ton of chaff to sort wheat from and as a result I don't use email much for anything apart from when I have to.
Like, I guess that's technically usable, I'm much happier filtering 44 emails than 594 emails? But that's like saying I solved the problem of a flat tire by installing a wooden cart wheel.
It's also worth noting there that if I do have an email thats flagged as spam that shouldn't be, I then have to wade through a much deeper pond of shit to go find it as well. So again, better, but IMO not even remotely solved.
I’m not sure what you’ve done to get that level of spam, but I get about 10 spam emails a day at most and that’s across multiple accounts including one that I’ve used for almost 30 years and had used on Usenet which was the uber-spam magnet. A couple newer (10–15 year old) addresses which I’ve published on webpages with mailto links attract maybe one message a week and one that I keep for a specialized purpose (fiction and poetry submissions) gets maybe one to two messages per year, mostly because it’s of the form example@example.com so easily guessed by enterprising spammers.
Looking at the last days’ spam¹ I have three 419-style scams (widows wanting to give away their dead husbands’ grand piano or multi-million euro estate) and three phishing attempts. There are duplicate messages in each category.
About fifteen years ago, I did a purge of mailing list subscriptions and there’s very little that comes in that I don’t want, most notably a writer who’s a nice guy, but who interpreted my question about a comment he made on a podcast as an invitation to be added to his manually managed email list and given that it’s only four or five messages a year, I guess I can live with that.
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1. I cleaned out spam yesterday while checking for a confirmation message from a purchase.