The world needs another website like...it needs more spam.

Greetings,

Well I finally got off my butt and decided to start writing about the ever increasing problem of email based spam. The problem got so bad at one point that I was getting 1000-1500 spams per DAY. Almost half a million a year, rain, sleet or snow! They would come pouring in while I slept. When I went to the gym, bam there would be 100 more. Went out to eat, I could count on another 10 minutes of my life wasted reading 73 more when I got back. The worst was when I didn't check email for a long weekend or a mini vacation. OMG, I would have thousands waiting for me.

Needless to say, I got really good at filtering and scanning the messages. I often use techniques like sorting on Subject or Sender and also by Date/Time. Spammers use all kinds of techniques to mask spam they send you. They make up fake names, send from fake dates in the past or future, send from people on the same server or "friends" accounts that may have been hijacked or exploited via address book viruses. Because I had so many email accounts and received so much duplicate spam, I was able to often eliminate large chunks through this simple sorting methodology. Stopping spam became an almost full time job and the more filters and programs I set up to help me, the more likely I would have a false positive (an email that gets incorrectly tagged as spam). As you can imagine, looking through 10,000 emails in my spam box for a "real" message is not practical.

In the coming weeks and months I will talk about various problems facing the world of legitimate email users and various solutions to those problems including lots of effective tips and tricks. In the meantime, please check out the rest of http://www.eatspam.com/ for info, free products and services and news. Please link to me and bookmark this site.

Thanks a lot and I look forward to telling you how I went from 500,000+ spams a year down to about 10 per day.

Matthew

http://www.eatspam.com/