Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

I know it must have been gradual but honestly it seemed like it was overnight. I’m getting tons upon tons of spam now. Not just from a few “companies” but from a handful. From herbal viagra and penis enlargement to sex toys and pirated software to when “Paypal” and “First Bank” need me to please please please update my account information (..at this .cx domain or some ip address).

So I’ve enlisted the help of SpamAssassin via Dreamhost on my @vocino.com addresses. I’ll admit, I don’t exercise much care when listing my email address, so it does get picked up a lot by spam bots. However, I hope it’s not too far gone to be helped by some good tools.

Funny, though, in a survey conducted earlier this fall by Bluestreak, US online users did not seem overly concerned about the amount of spam in their e-mail boxes. With the exception of users ages 50 and older (my grandmother certainly included), none of them thought spam accounted for more than 20% of the volume of e-mails they received.

Maybe they’re just not looking in their junk mail folders.

According to the online security firm IronPort Systems, 62 billion spam messages a day clogged US email systems in October, and that is twice the volume of the previous October. Shit.

IronPort analysts cited two reasons for the increase: one, more types of spam (and I think I, personally, get all of them!), and two, an increase in the number of el8 b0t networks that deliver spam. Together they account for a record crush of unsolicited commercial email. Not to mention that there are reports that unwanted email is currently 91% of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120%. That really sucks.

At any rate, I hope to lock this problem down soon. If you are sending me email and you haven’t heard anything, it’s possible my Total Spam Annihilation plan has gone too far, so let me know otherwise… somehow.