Final Spam Tally

Posted on October 19, 2003    Posted by John Scalzi

All right, I’m ending my spam count about an hour and 20 minutes early. But from 12:01am last monday morning to 10:38pm tonight, I have received exactly 3,503 pieces of spam mail. In contrast, in the same amount of time, I’ve received 80 non-spam e-mails, for a ratio of 43.8 pieces of spam for every bit of “real” e-mail that I get. Or to put it another way, only 2.2% of the mail I get is not trying to scam me or sell me something I don’t want. It’s also 500 pieces of spam a day — one e-mail of spam every 172 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The amount of spam I received has also demonstrably increased over the last year. A year ago I could expect to get some 4,000 pieces of mail a month — mostly spam — and now as you can see that amount has just about quadrupled, so now instead of my mail being mostly spam it is almost entirely spam. It seems unlikely that the amount of spam I get would quadruple again in the next year, but then again, I would have thought 1,000 pieces of spam a week would have been difficult to top.

I wouldn’t want to kill a spammer myself. But I do have to say that if I read that someone crept into a spammers mobile home and tortured him slowly over six days, using various gauges of piano wire, I would spend so little time grieving that I worry about my loss of humanity. Odd that I have not received a spam offering to find it for me.