I used to get a lot of spam – particularly to random email addresses@niddler.com (sales@, marketing@ were among the most common) – I ended up creating a spam-sink; an email account I never used, which took all the most common spam-targets and effectively dropped them into a black hole.
When signing up for stuff I tend to give them an email address which is their company name at my domain – it makes it surprisingly easy to find emails from a particular vendor AND it means I know if their database has been hacked. Initially I tried contacting these companies to warn them that their email database had been compromised, but I’ve long since given up as it took forever to get to anyone technical, and they ALWAYS said the problem was at my end – not theirs. Needless to say, those companies no longer get my business.
Anyway, finally I found I was getting more and more spam to my email address that all my friends use. With the significant rise in malware, my address was being harvested directly from their accounts… and I can hardly start blocking them (well, it would be a little unkind).
THEN I started getting spam purporting to be FROM those friends – I even blogged about it.
…it turns out their accounts hadn’t been hacked by the usual means, but by something a bit more obscure – specifically from yahoo addresses – where yahoo had been hacked (the biggest ever… probably).
Anyway, I’ve got a google apps account, and for all the bad stuff said about the mountain view chocolate factory, they are really very good at differentiating spam and ham. There’s the odd bit of low-grade marketing emails that go into my spam, but I’ve not had a genuine ‘ham‘ go there for years.
I keep an eye on the volume of spam that I get, largely out of curiosity, and google delete it after a month – so it’s a kind of rolling monthly score. There was a time when it numbered in the thousands… and today I had a peek. It turned out I could unsubscribe from mailings from reputable companies that were sending out low-grade marketing junk, so I tried that and deleted the emails (never unsubscribe from something you didn’t sign up to – it’s just a way of saying ‘yep, someone reads the emails sent here’, and will get you much MORE spam!)… that left me with 10 (ten).
…I can’t work out if it’s the global fight against spam (which has had some fairly major victories) or something to do with the DKIM signature I’ve added to my domain somehow frightening off the spammers (on the bright side, as I’ve done that, it means you’re much less likely to ‘lose’ my emails into the spam folder… not that I have the time to email anyone anyway!).
Anyway, long rambling way of saying “anyone else noticing less spam these days?”. Perhaps the global market for Viagra has dipped…