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0 pointsToucanLoucan1y ago0 comments

> but spammers mostly lost that arms race

I'm not saying this is impossible but that's going to be an uphill sell for me as a concept. According to some quick stats I checked I'm getting roughly 600 emails per day, about 550 of which go directly to spam filtering, and of the remaining 50, I'd say about 6 are actually emails I want to be receiving. That's an impressive amount overall for whoever built this particular filter, but it's also still a ton of chaff to sort wheat from and as a result I don't use email much for anything apart from when I have to.

Like, I guess that's technically usable, I'm much happier filtering 44 emails than 594 emails? But that's like saying I solved the problem of a flat tire by installing a wooden cart wheel.

It's also worth noting there that if I do have an email thats flagged as spam that shouldn't be, I then have to wade through a much deeper pond of shit to go find it as well. So again, better, but IMO not even remotely solved.

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dhosek1y ago

I’m not sure what you’ve done to get that level of spam, but I get about 10 spam emails a day at most and that’s across multiple accounts including one that I’ve used for almost 30 years and had used on Usenet which was the uber-spam magnet. A couple newer (10–15 year old) addresses which I’ve published on webpages with mailto links attract maybe one message a week and one that I keep for a specialized purpose (fiction and poetry submissions) gets maybe one to two messages per year, mostly because it’s of the form example@example.com so easily guessed by enterprising spammers.

Looking at the last days’ spam¹ I have three 419-style scams (widows wanting to give away their dead husbands’ grand piano or multi-million euro estate) and three phishing attempts. There are duplicate messages in each category.

About fifteen years ago, I did a purge of mailing list subscriptions and there’s very little that comes in that I don’t want, most notably a writer who’s a nice guy, but who interpreted my question about a comment he made on a podcast as an invitation to be added to his manually managed email list and given that it’s only four or five messages a year, I guess I can live with that.

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1. I cleaned out spam yesterday while checking for a confirmation message from a purchase.

wpietri1y ago

I'm having a hard time finding reliably sourced statistics here, but I suspect you're an outlier. My personal numbers are way better, both on Gmail and Fastmail, despite using the same email addresses for decades.

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dhosek1y ago

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1. I cleaned out spam yesterday while checking for a confirmation message from a purchase.

wpietri1y ago

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