Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 03:50:35 -0400
From: Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Speel checkers?
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

"Keith F. Lynch" wrote:

> Ted White <tedwhite at compusnet.com> wrote:
> > I suppose spammers are operating on the shotgun-approach philosophy
> > that there is *bound* to be a few suckers among all those thousands
> > of email addresses ...
>
> Thousands?  Try tens of millions.
>
> > But I cannot imagine responding to *any* email offer spammed to me.
>
> Neither can 99.99999% of the recipients -- no exaggeration.  Positive
> response rates are about one in ten million.  That's all it takes.
>
> > (Lately it's Viagra or some herbal wannabe, penis or breast
> > enlargement and the perennial Work At Home/Make Big Money pitches.
> > The casino pitches seem to have vanished.)
>
> About a third of what manages to evade my filters is from various
> Nigerian former first ladies and generals.  About once an hour, one
> asks my assistance in recovering 30 million dollars or so, for which I
> would receive about ten percent.  All I need do is loan them the use
> of my bank account.  If I took them all up on it, and if they were all
> telling the truth, I could be a billionaire by the end of the summer.
>
> Evidently a lot of people fall for it.  I've heard this is now
> Nigeria's largest industry.
>
> > I find it easy and effortless to hit the "delete" key.
>
> Literally effortless?  You wouldn't mind if next year you have to do
> it ten times as much?  Or if the year after that, it's ten times as
> much again?
>
> New Jersey fan Bill Wells receives over 100,000 spams a day.  He's
> only a little ahead of me on the spam meltdown curve.  And I'm only
> a little ahead of you.  Exponential growth is a terrible thing.
>
> I think a fair punishment for spammers is for them to be jailed with
> a keyboard, and released as soon as they press delete once for every
> spam they ever caused to be sent.  Some of them have sent so many
> that they cannot complete this task in a normal lifetime.  But they
> blithely imposed it on the rest of us.

Checking my "trash" -- which I deliberately haven't emptied for a couple of
months, because I wanted to see how much spam I was getting, I find the
following:

I last emptied my "trash" in the middle of May -- around May 12th or 13th.
But because so many spams are misdated, it's hard to be positive about that
date.

If I go by the dates on the spam, I've received a peak of just under two
dozen in one day, and typically more like half a dozen.  Since about May 13th
I've received a total of 442.   36 of these are  dated *1969*.  One is dated
2000.  9 are dated 2001.  I assume these early dates are designed to put them
at the head of my queue -- where it's easy to notice and delete them.  So
they throw off my daily averages if I look only at specific dates.  But
overall, I averaged slightly less than 12 spam a day.  (442 spam in 38 days.)

I can live with that.   It compares with a daily average of around 200 posts
that I *read*.

--Ted White