I used to have a lively email correspondence, sometimes dozens of messages a day from on-line friends. It was hard to keep up and get anything else done. I would be annoyed at the spam, five or six a day during the worse periods.
Over the years, emails from friends have dropped drastically. At first I was puzzled, but shrugged and decided that people had just gotten too busy with jobs and families. For awhile they may have been lured into an active correspondence by the ease of email, then as the novelty wore off, they slipped back into previous habits and patterns.
I no longer think that is the case.
This morning I received:
-1 email from a friend
-1 requested commercial email from a bookstore
-39 spams caught by my server's spam filter.
-4 spams that got through the server's spam filters and ended in my Junk box.
-1 spam that fooled both the server's spam filters and my own and ended in my In box.
-6 Returned Mail messages from mail sent out from a website I own that has been hijacked by a spammer.
That's 2 legitimate emails out of 52 messages.
No wonder so many people have given up.
Spam is well on the way to destroying the promise of email interaction.
Posted by Deck at December 27, 2006 07:58 AM