I spent this past weekend going through my email doing an ultimate spam sort.
For the past few years I have been sorting and organizing my emails to a relative level of success. I have numerous rules that determine whether or not a message is spam. After that, the legitimate messages are sorted and put into the appropriate folders as are spam. I have countless levels of valid email to keep things nice and organized, but I also have various “buckets” of spam where I keep even junk email organized instead of one big bin. I find it interesting to see what types of spam I am getting. More importantly, I do not throw any messages away because I do not like the idea of losing a message that was incorrectly classified as spam. I figure that if I keep everything, and make sure that they are all sorted, then should I ever miss a message, I can easily find it, even if it’s in the spam bin.
Unfortunately, this policy of keeping every message is no longer feasible. Spammers have taken to sending graphical spam instead of textual, which means that the size of spam messages has exploded from an average of 2KB per message to over 30KB. I have even seen spam on the order of more than ½MB! A quick calculation shows that I am now receiving about 250MB of spam per year. Clearly this is an untenable situation. My message store used to be about 74MB and now it is 350MB. I can no longer afford to keep everything. Which bring us to this past weekend.
I decided to ditch anything that is genuine spam. This is however a task that is easier said than done. It took many hours (lets say about 10). Worse still, it required actually looking at the content of the spam, which goes against the very purpose of fighting spam. However it eventually ended and I was able to clean out more than 31,000 spam messages from my system and over 250MB. Yay! In the process a few messages grabbed my attention for one reason or another. They were just so amusing that I decided to start a spam roll where I post the most interesting spams I receive. Here is a link to the first entry.
Now that I’ve got this massive stockpile of aggravating, infuriating, garbage, I need to decide whether to simply delete it or to bundle it up and send it to a spam analysis firm. I wonder if they can take 250MB files…