I came back from Vermont to find 1432 new email messages, 1407 of which were SPAM. This is getting out of hand. My Spam filter (SpamAssassin) caught about 1200 of them, but that still means I had over 200 messages to file through and determine which were real and which weren't. Not to mention the fact that I get a lot of false positives so I had to look over the Spam box anyway.
I see that most of the Spam I get goes to one of two addresses, sometimes both. One of those addresses I don't really use any more and could easily be disabled. But the other is my primary mail address. Changing it would mean changing my PGP Key, and updating lots of people with a new address for me. Neither of those sound like fun at all.
I'm trying to decide how to handle this. I could set up special email addresses for the services that I subscribe to and then enforce a challenge response system, but I'd rather bounce the mail these people are sending. Additionally, if I change the email address that I'm using at these various services, I then have to remember that email address in order to log in at each of them. I already do this in a few places and find that I forget what address I used quite often. And, a challenge response system isn't really the way to go. Without some form of additional verification (read these words and tell me what they say, listen to this audio and tell me what it says) Spammers will be able to circumvent such a system as well. It's only a matter of time.
Even if I crafted a new email address to use and kept it very private only giving it to people and NEVER putting it on a website or using it when conversing with mailing lists, some day someone is going to punch my address into "CrushLink" or "Friendster" or something, and then, there goes my protection.
It's more than annoying to deal with this much Spam. I can't possibly read each of these messages one by one to determine if they really are Spam or not. However, on a regular basis, non-Spam makes it into my Spam box. The likelihood that I delete real email with poor subject lines is very high.
Ugh.
