Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….
Spam
Things are really getting out of hand. My service provider’s spam filter caught 676 spam messages in the last 24 hours, a new record. There were 2 legitimate messages that the filter wrongly tagged as spam. Plus there were an additional 10 or 20 (I didn’t count) spam messages that got through the filter and made it to my email client (which caught about half of them, the rest I had to delete one by one). I’m not sure whether to be amazed more by the efficiency of the spam filter, or by the sheer volume of spam that I get sent; I suppose the two are correlative phenomena of ferocious Darwinian competition – an evolutionary arms race – on the Net (something I am also thinking about because it is a major theme of Peter Watts’ SF novel Maelstrom, which I am almost finished reading and will report on shortly). The filter makes it a minor annoyance instead of a major headache, but still. A year ago I was receiving 150 pieces of spam a day, and thought that was a lot….