How much spam is too much spam?

[Stinky The Clown]

I routinely get 150 to 200 separate pieces of spam per day. Every day, Seven days a week. This is on my work e-mail. The server has filters set and they trap another fifty or so more, but still that much spam gets through. I have since installed a spam blocker, SpamSeive, which is incredibly effective. One false positive and three false negatives since installing it. But since it doesn't delete the spam, it just sequesters it, it keeps on coming.

Is 150 to 200 a day excessive? I get maybe 15 or 20 legit e-mails a day.

[struggle4progress]

1. It seems like a lot to me: I've seen estimates in the 10-25 spam email per person per day

But I've also seen estimates that 90% of email is spam, in which case you're running about as expected

Statistics may vary because some ISPs might filter a lot out

[hobbit709]

2. I used to get at least 100 a day on my main email box

Then I think SWBell improved their filters-now it's 2 or 3 a day.

[canetoad]

3. 150 -200 a day would drive me mad

That's far more than we receive at work, and those email addresses are all over the web for harvesters to grab.

We use Mailwasher in the office. Create white/black lists and preview your mail on the server. At least we're not using bandwidth downloading the crap.

[RoyGBiv]

4. That's too much ...

It indicates your e-mail provider has very poor SPAM filtering.

One reason I switched to using Gmail is that they have very good SPAM filtering. And it "learns" what you consider SPAM by you marking what gets through as such.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. That was demonstrated *very* clearly when I installed SpamSieve

It has stopped very nearly 100% of the SPAM that my provider doesn't catch. And the accuracy is amazing.

As it happens, we're changing our company e-mail. We first initial/last name at company dot com

[e-mail]

We're changing to just first names (we're a smallish company)

[e-mail]




So that leaves one big question: How the hell did I get on so many spam lists????? And how do I avoid it in future?