Remember my spam-handling trick from way back? The one where I gave out one-time email addresses on my web site, and then dumped those addresses that received spam in the trash? And addresses that didn't match the pattern for my one-times were forwarded to Gmail, which has been handling almost 200,000 of them per month? I was excited back when because I automated the process of making the recipes. After 4,243,626 trashed messages (and some other number processed by Gmail's filtering), the hosting company shut it down. They said mail processing on the system had ground to a halt, so they moved all of my forwarding recipes elsewhere. That meant 44,000 messages piled up in my inbox there. When I try to use Mutt to cut that down, Mutt is killed as a resource hog. Sigh!

When I turned my computer on this morning, the Gmail notifier ran through my unread messages. I was very surprised to see one from "Rodney McCoy". Could it be? My Mother goes to Rodney McCoy performances regularly. Maybe his next show would line up with my next trip to Pittsburgh, so she used his web site to send me an email?

Alas, no. This was notifying me of a plane crash victim whose money was waiting for me in London. My interest was piqued again by the most unlikely name of the deceased "relative": Dr. Pitt Ventura. Again with the Pittsburgh reference! How much did this guy research me to customize such a message? Did he study at the Ford Prefect School of Onomatology?

I noticed last week that my spam folder on Gmail had finally crossed the 35,000 mark. They supposedly delete stuff in there after thirty days, so that means I'm getting much more than 1,000 per day that has to go through spam filters. I checked how many spam had made it into my Gmail inbox over the same period and it was over 1,100. That means they're still averaging better than 96% accurate for me. Yay. Let's see . . . since I started logging my spam that gets dumped just based on the address to which it's sent, there've been 963,594 such messages in 620 days. That means more than a half-million per year. I should have my millionth logged message well before the end of the year. Whee!

In other news, today was MIFgiving. This is the Music Interest Floor's annual holiday feast. I tried two of the four turkeys, and they were both pretty good. They were cooking up some pretty wild stuff, including one turkey flavored with burgundy and a fried one covered with Emeril spices. In addition to traditional gravy, they had a spiced cider reduction. Unfortunately, I failed to eat anything before I went. In fact, my entire food-and-liquid intake before it was a cup of tea with honey. I'd planned to do breakfast, but that didn't happen. Food wasn't served until three, and I probably would've grabbed something earlier if I'd realized that. Naturally, they weren't serving water, just sweetened lemonade and iced tea. Can you say "dehydration"? I was totally zonked by the time I got home.

Most of the time, there's only one type of spam that makes it past Google's spam filters. Which type will change over time, but right now I'm getting a few come-ons from women who want to meet me. They will be visiting soon and want to meet. Today's two describe themselves as "pretty" and "attractive" girls. One claims to have seen a picture of me, and that I am "lovely". What I find most hilariously incompetent about these messages is the From header. Today's two came from Marvin and Kurtis. Yeah. Good luck with that, guys.

I was quickly growing agitated with the short battery life on my new cell phone. I was starting to suspect I'd need to recharge the darn thing nightly, especially since I get such low signal quality in my office. It dawned on me that I might be consuming battery power by leaving the GPS doodad active even when I wasn't calling 911. I'd turned it on with the expectation that I'd see better features in some of the Mobile Web content because my location was available to the sites, but I never noticed any such improvement. Turning it off has significantly extended the battery life, sparing me from buying the expensive and bulky extended battery. Hooray!

In my quest to reduce the flow of spam into my inbox, I've done lots of crazy things. Spammers, though, have done crazier. I finally realized that I was probably generating improperly-named .qmail files in my account for addresses whose mailbox name included a period. I checked the documentation on my ISP's web site and confirmed my mistake. The scripts have been adjusted, and one of the feedmyego.com addresses that receives dozens of spam in a typical day is now properly shunted to my spamtraps address. Hooray!

Dear Spammers,

Thank you for your recent messages, which provide excellent journal fodder. I'm trying to understand the rationale behind some of your latest tactics. This weekend, I received more than 125 messages promoting a product to enhance my sex life. Based solely on the subject lines, I'm pretty sure this is a device intended to improve sexual intercourse. As a singleton, I am singularly unlikely to buy such devices, but I appreciate the vote of confidence that I will need one soon. The really perplexing part is where you chose to send these 125 messages: spam@ and abuse@ my domain. I see that dozens more of these messages also went to other administratorish addresses at my domain like admin@. What made you think that it was a good idea to spam the very people who are in the best position to block all emails mentioning your product?

Just curious.

tfofurn

I just got some spam from an eager horticulturist.

Hi Hi. I'm Julie,
I am actually sitting in my room and chatting to a bunch of people on my contact lists. I have to admit it is exciting, but do you know what else is exciting me giving you a privet show online for free! .. Hehe, I love saying that line. No seriously, that's the best part about this we both get our share ;D. I have to tell you I am getting good at this.

Some years ago, I started the trick of handing out different addresses to everyone. A CGI script on the web site handles dynamic address generation. When it comes to generating addresses to give to companies, though, I usually put the name of the company and an at sign in front of feedmyego.com. When I book tickets with an airline, it's natural that I would give them the name of the airline at feedmyego. Tonight, I was on the phone with a customer service rep to shift a trip forward by a few days. She asked if I wanted the new flight details emailed to the same address I'd provided when I bought the tickets. Yes, please. Then she looked at the address and started laughing. "I have to ask you about this." I explained the motivation behind Feed My Ego and the reason I'd set up an address just for her airline. I don't think she stopped laughing during the entire lecture. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if she was "laughing at" or "laughing with".

Latest update from the spam watching: 33170 in 50d 5h 23m: 660 per day. Let's see . . . my daily spam load went up by 50% just in the last five weeks. Oh, and that 660 number is low because that's the average over all fifty days, which is almost certainly much lower the number received in the last 24 hours. Damn. At least I need no longer complain that I'm not getting enough spam. Next goal: a program that runs through the log spitting out a daily summary.

I watched a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment on Monty Python's Spamalot. Written by Eric Idle and starring Tim Curry, Hank Azaria, and David Hyde-Pierce? I'm in. Who wants to hit NYC?

A while ago, I redirected my LiveJournal email notifications to my Gmail account. Today I noticed that somebody had commented on a post, but I hadn't received the notification. A quick in:spam livejournal search revealed that not one, or two or three, but four comment notifications had been filed as spam. Eep! Let's hope I can set the right example by setting all four to "not spam" in one swoop.

In other news, I've added another twist to my automated spam trashing. I now have a text file in my home directory that stores timestamps for individual spam arriving at any of the previously established trap addresses. Each receiving address has to have its own .qmail file. Fortunately, programs executed from within those files inherit a set of environment variables that include the filename of the .qmail file. Ding! I just open the log file, lock it, print the time stamp (seconds since the epoch) and that environment variable, then unlock and close the log file. This way I'll be able to see just how awful my spam load really is, instead of the much smaller number I see in my Gmail spam folder. With more than two-hundred addresses being filtered, I'm pretty sure I'm receiving well over a thousand. I also expect to be able to plot things like density vs. time of day. Since the filtered addresses tend to tip me off to the time they were harvested, I might even be able to correlate the harvest time with the spam time. Hmm . . .

As you may recall, I've got a fairly complicated way to deal with spam. For a while, I thought the correct approach was to shut down long-running addresses that were receiving oodles of spam. I'd migrate everyone who emailed me to custom addresses chosen just for them. My web site was handing out unique addresses to every visitor, which helps to shunt metric tons of spam away from my inbox.

Still, it was hard to identify the magic point at which nobody would ever send mail to one of those old accounts again. The solution thus far has been Gmail. The Spam folder in my Gmail account has more than 9,200 messages in it, all received in the last 31 days. Of those 9,200, only 76 made it to my inbox. Gmail's spam-filtering accuracy is therefore in the 99% range, which makes me very happy.

The only spam that reached my inbox so far today made a curious offer: refinance my apartment. We'll ignore for a moment that I no longer live in an apartment. The message referenced my address in the old apartment, including "apt #1". Yes, you know the cost of sending spam is too low when they think it's worthwhile to mention the recipient's snail mail address, but not worthwhile to filter out the addresses with apartment designations in them!