For the duration of 2006 I kept all the spam I received in a folder. At the end of the year it added up to about 42,000 pieces — one every 9.4 minutes. At the time I thought that was a lot of spam.
Currently I get far too much spam to bother storing it for a year, so I used a shorter period of time: 24 hours. In that time I got 986 pieces of spam. That’ s one every 86 seconds, and that’s pretty typical recently. That works out to 359,890 per year — eight times what I got four years ago.
The vast majority is for Viagra. The word Viagra appears in 672 of the messages. Interestingly, back in 2006 the word mortgage was one of the most popular words. Mortgage appears in only 1 of the recent 986 messages.
Luckily my spam filter works pretty well. Otherwise this volume of spam would make my account virtually unusable. But it’s still a pain in the ass. Of course I could change my email address, but why should I? I like my email address.
Things will have to get worse before I’ll seriously consider changing the address I’ve had since 1995. And yet, at this rate, I’ll soon be getting a million spam messages a year.
And this doesn’t even count the paper mail! I can’t tell you how many days a week everything from the mail goes straight into the recycle bin.