Eisenstadt's Analysis Of 8 Years' Worth Of Email

Hylton writes "Thought this might be of interest: Marc Eisenstadt's saved every email he's gotten over the past eight years, including spam, and run an analysis of it."

Indeed

[mboverload]

I used to NEVER get spam, I didn't know what people were complaining about. I was on a mail server that no spammer really knew about, so there were no dictionary mailings. However, once I posted that paticular email on just a few websites I have been getting ~50 spam a day. There is no way they got my email through me signing up for things because I use a seperate address. I'm just glad the kind of practices they use (trawling the internet for emails) are illegal, although that doesn't mean much.

I will never buy anything from spam, and whoever does has got to be a complete moron.

every month on lug radio

[QuantumG]

One of the guys reminds us that people who send those "increase your penis size" emails and other spam don't just do it because they think it is fun to piss off the world, they do it because they make lots and lots of money from it.

That's what anti-spam laws should be targeting, the morons who use the services offered by spammers.

Re:Indeed

[autopr0n]

Trawling for email addresses isn't illegal at all, certanly not in the USA which actualy legalized spam with the CAN-SPAM act.

The domains I use for email arn't even up right now, and I'm using gmail these days anyway. I had been using 'throwaway' emails for everything, and then a spammer started jo-jobbing me. Meaning that they started using fake addresses @mydomain. So I was getting tons and tons of bounce messages. It was awful.

These spammers are horrible people, but they're not even close to stupid. They're obviously making money off of it, or they would have stopped doing it a long time ago.

Not very much

[brunes69]

I rotate my email folders every 6-9 months to increase performance.

Even so, I have 2 folders with over 9000 Emails in them. My work Inbox alone has 1015. None of these are spam - I filter those out through a combination of SpamAssassin and manual filtering.

Anyways - my point is that the numbers in this article are small potatoes. He talks about 250 Emails in a week - I easily get 300 -400 Emails **a day**, probably 40-50 of which are directly work related, the other 350 related to various other side projects of mine, so they are just as important.

I would say I read around 25-50% of my Emails. The rest I only give a cursory scan. His numbers for reply times are way off for a number of reasons:

- Hardly anyone replies to every email they recieve. Most of it needs no reply.

- He basically says that the time spent reading the emails and responding is a waste. Well, what do you think managers did to communicate with you before email? You had faxes, daily memos, daily reports to file... it is just more streamlined now. It is not like this stuff is new.

Newsflash - work is difficult. People are distracting to your work. Shit happens. Deal with it, just like everyone else has for the past 150 years.

Re:If you think this article is about spam, read e

[Tony Hoyle]

It depends on what you use it for.

I work for a company on the other side of the globe.. couldn't do that without email. I also support an opensource project with 10,000 downloads a week... that generates 'a few' support queries :) Heck, without email I don't even think I could do that by phone without hiring a call center.

Mods On Crack (M.O.C.)

[Lehk228]

*Sacrafices karma to protest idiotic mods*

Re:Femto's Law of Email

[dvdeug]

Given enough time, nearly every email becomes irrelevant.

Given enough time, nearly everything becomes irrelevant. That job resume you're writing up now is going to be pretty irrelevant in 3 years; but that doesn't mean you can ignore it now.

Own domain offers new methods

[4Lancer.net]

Having your own domain offers a neat way of tracking where spam comes from. For example, if you see the email I use here, I will know any spam that comes from someone getting my address from here. Of course, /. isn't the best example. Say I sign up at a website, misfitriprapper.com. I will use misfitriprapper.com as the username before the @4la... I use this method EVERYWHERE. I just sent an email last night to Epson support. My email address? epson.com@4la... We've all learned years ago to not trust anybody, so, I don't even trust the big companies like Epson.

Re:Indeed

[joschm0]

> I should point out that you shouldn't respond to spam under ANY circumstances - it just verifies to the spammer that your address exists.

Wouldn't they know if your email address is good by the fact that it wasn't rejected as an invalid address?

Re:Indeed

[Grakun]

> > I should point out that you shouldn't respond to spam under ANY circumstances - it just verifies to the spammer that your address exists.

> Wouldn't they know if your email address is good by the fact that it wasn't rejected as an invalid address?

It verifies that the user has read the spam. There are a lot of old inactivate email addresses on the web, which still exist but are never read. This way the spammer knows that their spam is actually being viewed by a user, and not just wasting space in an inbox.

Re:Not very much

[ricka0]

Wow... how do you get anything done? ;)

You have a good point about it being more streamlined... however, I suspect that since e-mail is easier to send than a memo, fax, etc, etc, there would be more e-mails than the other mediums in the past. Also, more of them seem to be written with less thought put in. You always hear stories about people wishing they hadn't sent that e-mail or how the number errors in e-mails vs memos, etc are so much greater. If there are indead more errors in e-mails, does a poorly written e-mail with various errors take longer to read? (On Slashdot at least, I think that is definitely the case with poor spelling/grammar in posts, since you then must skim past 2 pages of spelling/grammar fanatics arguing with themselves!)

Re:Femto's Law of Email

[wmspringer]

You can safely ignore your email and suffer minimal long term consequences.

I dunno...in 3 years I might not care that my boss wanted to see me this Friday, but if I ignore her email there's a pretty good chance I'll be changing jobs :-)

Email Address

[Mr. Jax]

Does anyone know if he used the same email address throughout those 12 years? If he switched addresses the spammers might not have known about the new address, thus reducing the amount of spam he will receive the coming years.

Re:Own domain offers new methods

[aCC]

I used to use your system. Unfortunately it has 2 flaws which made me change it again:

First, the spambots also send a lot of mail to fantasy names with your domain or-- even worse-- they use a fantasy name with your domain as the sender address so you get the millions of error mails.

Second, I once received a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer because I used their domain as part of my email address to subscribe to their newsletter. It was something like [e-mail].

I then decided to have only some emails addresses like [e-mail], [e-mail] etc. to roughly know where they come from.

For useless one-time email addresses, I use the Mailinator [mailinator.com]. Excellent for that purpose.

Only 40% ??

[lcsjk]

Last year I kept all my email at work for 6 months. I called all mail that I had not personally signed up for to be SPAM and that includes conference announcements. Approximately 51% was SPAM of about 3000 total. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me anymore. During the summer and fall, I let some graduate students use my computer, and now I get approximately 75 % SPAM. I don't read it all, but I also get email to my computer that has a different user name and email address.