The Significant Decline of Spam 263
Orome1 writes "In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the world's pharmacy spam. Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December's daily average was around 30% less than September's. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%."
person+foo@domain.com (Score:2, Informative)
What really gets me is the amount of of dating spam that gets sent to an account I use for FreeBSD porting & CPAN. One would think spammers would avoid certain domains as they're only used by techies. Then again, maybe we're so desperate we'll jump at any chance of talking to a bird.
That's why I like using the "+" separator whenever I can. It allows easy filtering and I know exactly where it was received from.
Unfortunately a lot of web form validation systems don't accept the format "person+foo@domain.com" as valid, and I have to end up removing the "+foo". When I was more active on Usenet I used a date-based format for my posting ("person+unetYYmmDD@domain.com") that I updated semi-regularly. I then created a ".forward+unetYYmmDD" that put things into /dev/null once the address was harvested after a few months.
I believe Gmail supports the +foo modifier, but my company exchange system sadly does not.