I surrender my email address to spammers

Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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I surrender my email address to spammers

I surrender! I surrender! Just as Captain Kirk begrudgingly surrendered the Enterprise, as of today I have surrendered my corporate email account to the spammers. Spammers can have my email address, which has become completely overwhelmed with spam. As of today it will bounce back as 'System Undeliverable' and I have chosen a new tmcnet.com email address. Sure my friends, contacts, and all my Web signups will be caught up in what some may deem a draconian tactic, until they find my new email, but that's it - I’ve had it! Enough of the spam!

I have had the same corporate email account since the Internet started to take off in 1994. Thus, I have had the same email address for nearly 13 years which must be in just about every spam list you can think of. I get nearly 500 spam emails per day, which has rendered my corporate email account a productivity killer instead of a productivity enhancer. You're probably thinking I'm exaggerating with my 500 email claim, since everyone loves to bitch/whine , as well as exaggerate about how much spam they get.

And so I have included proof via a screenshot below that includes every single spam from yesterday (Thursday) totalling 465 emails. Click the screenshot for a full image that will measure 504 x 6649 pixels. That's a mighty big graphic height-wise (6649), so when you first load the full image you'll have to Zoom in just to read the text.

My Daily Spam


Even though I have deployed anti-spam measures on the Exchange Server (GFI MainEssentials) to tag spam, it’s only ~95% accurate, which means some spam gets through as well as false positives that get lumped in with hundreds of other spam I still have to sift through. I’m also using DNSBL (DNS email blacklists) which catches a lot of spam, but not all.

In addition, I also have iHateSpam antispam software installed on my mail client as well as my own custom Outlook email rules. This means I have 4 anti-spam Maginot lines of defense against spammers -- and still it is not enough. Just as the French’s Maginot Line was easily overwhelmed by the Germans, resulting in France’s quick surrender, my anti-spam Maginot line is no match for the spammers blitzkrieg attacks.

My email productivity has gotten worse over the years due to the exponentially increasing spam. It’s much worse than the productivity that it hurts -- receiving tons of spam affects your entire mood and morale. I dread going into work in the morning and having to sift through hundreds of spam emails. It is truly frustrating. My Irish stubbornness often kicks in and I take the battle against the evil spammers personally. Thus, I try and do battle against the l spam onslaught by periodically checking email at night when I am home. This way at least my morning Inbox is more manageable. and I haven’t started my work day ticked off that it took me 30 minutes to sift through all my email. But when my work bleeds into my personal life for unproductive work such as sifting through spam – then enough is enough. On occasion I have seriously considered leaving TMC just so I could have a clean email address and start fresh. It's that frustrating to me.

And thus, I have surrendered my email address. Yes, I know I am "cutting and running". So? Let the evil spammers have their way with my email account, I just don’t care any more. Let them waste their own treasure and bandwidth fighting over my non-existent email – see if I care. Oh and by the way, I think President Bush needs to add spammers to his Axis of Evil list – seriously. If President Bush were able to solve the worldwide spam problem his ratings would soar.

Well, I have a new email address and I'm loving it. Ahhh, no blitzkrieg of spam. No more hammering the Delete key in frustration. A nice clean Inbox. It’s truly a liberating experience.

To quote William Wallace from BraveHeart…
F R E E E D O M !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Note: Below is an embedded WAV file containing the Star Trek Surrender snippet, then a delaying playing of the famous Braveheart 'freedom' quote. Doesn't always work in Firefox)


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