DrBacchus' Journal

In the day of elaborately designed phishing messages that genuinely appear to be from my bank, it's almost refreshing to see spam like the following, which is so naive it's almost endearing:

DEAR : WEBMAIL USER .

YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS EMAIL BECAUSE WE ARE ABOUT TO CARRYOUT SOME MAINTANANCE ON ALL OUR EMAIL CLIENTS ACCOUNT BECAUSE WE HAVE DETECTED SOME TROJAN VIRUSES WHICH IS ABOUT TO SPREAD AND ATTACK ALL OUR EMAIL USERS MAILBOX.
SO AS FOR YOUR ACCOUNT TO REMAIN SAFE, YOU ARE REQUIRED EMAIL US YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS : jenni2nicess@yahoo.com . FOR US TO PROTECT YOUR ACCOUNT FROM BEEN CLOSED AND YOUR MESSAGES IN YOUR MAILBOX WILL STILL BE INTACT .
UPON RECEIPT OF THIS NOTIFICATION , YOU ARE TO RESPOND WITH YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD WITHIN THE NEXT 48HRS .

MERRY XMAS IN ADVANCE TO ALL OUR EMAIL CLIENTS .

What's distressing about it, though, is that there are people out there who are actually stupid (or trusting) enough that they will send their username and password to jenni2nicess.

Yesterday I switched email for my primary domain over to GMail. I have a dozen email addresses and a few distribution lists, and I moved about a half million email messages over to my GMail folders.

It's probably too early to sing its praises, since it's only been 12 hours, but ...

This morning, it was eerily quiet in my inbox. No strident calls to buy a genuine fake Roles, or increase the size and strength of various body parts. No encouragement to get my website to the top of the search results, or make a million dollars by helping out a long-lost relative in Uzbekistan.

It was rather like walking down the main street in a big city, but not being jostled by grubby passers-by, and not hearing the sound of cars, gunshots, hawkers, screaming children, barking dogs, or howling sirens, but being able to hear the polite, soft-spoken conversation of the well-dressed gentleman walking beside you.

I looked over in the Spam folder, and all the noise was there, where it should be, but as far as I could tell, none of the polite conversation had made it over there by mistake.

I think I'm going to like it here.

I just flipped the switch, and pointed the MX records for RCBowen.com at GMail. I've been running my own mail server for about 15 years now, and this is the first time I've trusted anybody else to handle @rcbowen.com email. We'll see how it goes. I sincerely hope that the outcome is less spam.

By far the most painful part of the process was migrating a half-million email messages from my IMAP server over to Google, and trying to get all the same folders and filtering rules set up. But, in the process, I deleted probably another quarter of a million email messages. Ye gods I have a lot of email.

And, yet, after all that, I'm only using 5% of my capacity on GMail.

Fitz notes that his email address appears 960 places on the web. I'm at 2630. This is one of the reasons that I'll very soon (hopefully tomorrow) switch my primary domain over to the Google for Domains service (or whatever they're calling it now), so that I can get out of the spam fighting business. I've spent an inordinate amount of time over the last 12 years or so trying to figure out how to get less spam to hit my inbox, and I'm all done. Google's got folks who do that full time, and, while I can't figure out why they would provide this to me for free, I'm perfectly willing to let them.

And, here's the results. You can, I'm sure, immediately pick out the point where I turned on the greylisting service. It's not a complete solution - I still get some spam - but you can see from the graph that I'm getting around 1/3 as much inbound mail as I was getting before.It's even more pronounced if you look at the month view

Notice that it affects the sent, as well as received, because so much of my outbound email was reject and bounce messages.