I did some research on the quantity of spam I get, and the numbers are staggering, at least for me and my four or five addresses.

If I were getting a penny for every piece of spam directed towards my mail server (so, all spam, regardless of the mailbox and whether or not I automatically send it to spam folder before it gets to my inbox) I’d be making an extra $480 per month. On average, my server receives 1,600

peices of spam a day. Completely unbelievable.

Perhaps if I took greater measures towards blocking the spam, I’d have less, and perhaps if I changed email addresses more often, and kept them more private I’d get less, but that’s always a pain.

What drives me to near insanity is all of the virus emails I’m getting (which I included in the above figures). In the time it took me to write this sentence, I’ve received 5 emails with infected attachments. I need to do something pretty quickly before my hard drive fills up. Luckily I check my mail through a web interface, so there’s no Outlook security issues, but still, insane. Luckily my mail server has tight integration with a Virus scanner, and sterilizes the files, otherwise I’d be a basket case.

I’ve seen news stories of people who have sued spammers and won, collecting small chunks of dough here and there. If I were good at that, I could make a living doing it. What a strange relationship I’d then have with spammers. I’d be encouraged to put my email addresses in high traffic situations, and it would sort of be like going fishing.

Sigh.