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December 19, 2003
Fun With Spam
I have an email address that has been active since the mid-1990s. That was back when it was unheard of to post anything commercial to USENET and there was no such thing as spam on the computer unless you were a messy eater. Email addresses were posted in the open in those dawning days of the new Internet frontier. That has come back to haunt the folks who have been "here" for a while.
My old email account receives 99.999% spam and the host it resides on does not filter at the mail server level. I have taken to not monitoring it for months and then opening the firehose just to see what crawls out.
Today I downloaded nearly 10,000 emails and started playing "The Spam Game" with them. Using the search tool, I tried to come up with the most common words that might reside in spam subjects. Using my total messages and my find hits, I could get a pretty good running percentage score.
OK, so I had some spare time today...