Spam Spam Spam Spammity Spam

At my place of work we use a highly sophisticated spam filter to sift out all the crap emails we receive daily. It’s extremely effective, but since we can’t be sure we haven’t missed any legitimate emails… we have our receptionist look through the spam emails daily. After a week of doing this I can surely tell you that it’s definitely one of the dirtiest, unrewarding, grating jobs you can ever do. Here are some statistics:

• On a daily basis we receive anywhere from two to three thousand spam emails.
• Of these 2-3,000 spam emails, one or two (per day) are legitimate.
• Every minute (on average) we receive 10 to 20 spam emails.
• Most of the spam (~80%) is legitimate bounce-back emails from mailservers stating that spam we sent couldn’t be delivered. This is because spammers harvest email addresses and forge spam emails using them.

All in all this adds up to a lot of crap. This entire week I have yet to reduce the unread spam emails to zero. Every day I might read through a few thousand, only for that few thousand to be replenished the next day. Currently the spam inbox is sitting at 5604 and counting (I’m watching more trickle in right now). Luckily at night we employ a much more strict ruleset so that the spam is reduced to a few hundred, but just think if we didn’t have that option… we’d have seven or eight thousand spam emails to sift through per day.

If you know someone who has to look through spam daily to retrieve legitimate emails, pat them on the back. Tell them you understand and sympathize with them. In fact, tell me that before I tear my hair out.