Saturday, April 17, 2004

Spam

I'm very much a nerd, and so I like numbers and fiddling with computers and such. I get fairly large amounts of spam since I've had my main email address since 1996 or so. I've gotten pretty good at filtering it out, but for some reason, it's a phenomenon that has always rather interested me. So I wrote a couple of quick programs in Java to count how much I've been getting lately. (I'm also teaching myself Java, and this was something I could do with it as practice.) This is pretty much automated, so I'll keep updating it as time goes on.

The results can be seen here.

Not surprisingly, the amount I've been getting has been increasing lately. I noticed a significant jump (like a factor or two) around the first of the year, when the CAN-SPAM act came into force, thanks to the idiots in Congress and the Direct Marketing Association. I only fear it is going to get worse.

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