When I was out at OSCON two weeks ago, I performed a little experiment. Since I knew that I was going to be using only one computer, my PowerBook, for the entire week, I decided that I would not delete any SPAM. Instead, I would let it all pile up in the "Junk" folder in Mail.app. I have been curious for awhile as to how much SPAM I'm actually getting, but it has been hard for me to track, because I am pretty fanatical about deleting it.
So, from Sunday the 23rd of July through Sunday August 1st, I didn't delete a single SPAM. And the total that I reached? A mere two hundred and seventy-seven messages. On the one hand, that is a lot of e-mail. It occurs to me as I write this that I should also have tracked the total number of e-mails that I received in that week, so as to determine the ratio of signal to noise in my inbox. But, one conclusion that I can reach is that I'm probably getting less SPAM then many other people out there on the 'net.
Oh, and the other conclusion is that SPAM sucks. But everybody knew that already, right?
-Andy.