[start rant inspired by over 300 spam emails in 30 minutes]
Since Friday, I’ve been reporting a selection of the spam I’ve been receiving to SpamCop. On Sunday, I decided to sign up and become a “paid member” – which allows me to, erm, help support SpamCop as far as I can see (oh – and actually set a few preferences and see my “usage levels”).
The way I’ve been “working things” is, I first use MailWasher to filter my email and bounce+delete the majority of the spam I receive. I leave around 10% of the spam to get through to my mail box (usually manually selected on the criteria of “unique destination” or “unique subject”). Once it arrives in my InBox, I then use the Microsoft Outlook 2000 utility SpamSource to “bounce” the messages off to SpamCop for processing. I then pop along to the SpamCop website and send off the complaints to the various ISPs (I used to be able to do this under RISC OS using just JunkMail – but that’s no longer a possibility for myself alas). The ISPs then (hopefully) deal with my complaint and cut off the spammer.
Since signing up to SpamCop (and “donating” to them via PayPal) on Sunday at 14.55 UTC (less than 4 days ago), I’ve sent them around 0.8Mb of spam, from which they predict I’ll send them 82.9Mb of spam per year. Remember that’s approximately a tenth of the spam I get (probably a lot less) – meaning I end up with over 830Mb of spam a year! Nearly a gig! That’s more spam than you can fit on a CD! Spamcop would ask for a “donation” of around $830 to “part-process” all of that – and it doesn’t take into account MY time, MY bandwidth or MY storage that the spammers take up. And the spammers claim “it costs nothing to delete our spam” – well, have a look at those figures and think again.
Oh, and thanks to SpamHaus, I’ve found out that spam has been outlawed in Europe.
[end rant]
