Before I went the whole nine nerd yards and bought my own domain name, I was using a regular ISP email account… one which I've still got active, as it was on my business card when I went to the US back in 1996, and soforth.
Lately I've been wondering just how much actual email is still heading to that account, so by way of scientific investigation, I changed all my mailing aliases to point to other accounts, and made it so the account in question would purely get messages addressed to it.
There were actually 3 addresses under investigation – one an extended alias for the other, and the third is one I'd been suspecting lots of spam from anyway.
I set up some inbox filters so I could figure out how many messages each address got, and then started counting as of last Friday at midnight. To date (Monday lunchtime), the count is as follows:
- jason@scoutnet.net.au : 529
- jason.standing@scoutnet.net.au : 262
- jason@fucs.org.au : 100
- Address hidden but must be one of those 3 : 91
So in total, in just over a week, those email addresses have received 982 spam messages.
Kinda takes some of the fun out of email, doesn't it ?
Anyway, I think I'm going to shut those addresses down soon, because it's just not practical to pore through all that rubbish any more. If any of those are the address you've got saved in your address book, please send me a message on the website form and I'll give you my current address. Cheers.