It's kind of odd - over the past couple days, I've been noticing that it's been taking longer to download my e-mail off the server and when I checked in on it, it was just because there were more e-mails there. I have my client set to check every 45 minutes and I'll usually get 70-80 e-mails, but when I checked a couple times over the past couple days, I was receiving upwards of 200. Now - why would there be a sudden spike in the amount of spam? It's not because there are more diverse spams coming in...but because I'm getting multiple copies of the same spam. In the past, I wouldn't really think twice about getting four copies of the same spam because they were all going to different e-mail aliases which filter into my one main account - so it would make sense that if four different aliases got on spam mailing lists, I'd get multiple copies. But now, for some reason, I'm getting 15-20 copies of the same spam message - all going to the same e-mail address.

Now, it's not really a huge problem because SpamBayes catches them all (if you send the same thing 20 times, if one is caught, all 20 are caught), but it's just a pain to have to download all these messages and I'm sure my hosting provider isn't too happy that my e-mail address is using up system resources (it can't be easy getting upwards of 5 e-mails a minute for my one e-mail address). In the end, it's no big deal because they're all filtered, but I am just trying to understand why I would get so many copies of the same thing sent to one address. I'm not going to click on anything in a spam - not even if you show it to me 20 times. If my e-mail filter catches one, it gets all 20 - so there's no point there to send multiple copies. I'm just trying to understand the spammer's logic (though I doubt any of them have a strong logic), but still - it makes absolutely no sense to me.

On a side note, I recently read an article where a company will pay you $1/hour for running their program on your computer. What does the program do? Does it search for E.T.? Does it crunch numbers or analyze proteins for science? Does it show ads on your computer (ahhh...the early days of internet advertising)? What could they possibly want to pay you $1/hour to run? Oh yeah - they're relaying spam through your computer. What a great idea. You can get paid $1/hour to get shut down by your ISP for spamming, get your ISP's IP address blocked across the internet and make tons of friends who are looking for vi.co.d1n. What a joke. I seriously hope that no one is stupid enough to sign up for this - though I'm sure you'll find some suckers out there.

URL: BB ~ Blake's Blog