Private Thoughts Made Public

There is an irc quote on www.bash.org which goes like this:
<Ruth> hmmm first thing to do when one gets home is …. check spam for emails
I’m glad I’m not the only one with this problem.
In years gone by, when life was less complicated and we were all much more naive than we are now, my (now ex-)wife and I bought a domain on which to host our fairly typical family web site. You know the sort of thing, a bit about us, some recipes, the family tree, some other irrelevant stuff. We set up email addresses (along the lines of webmaster@ourdomain, me@ourdomain, her@ourdomain, recipes@ourdomain and do on) and put these addressed on the web site as well. In retrospect this turned out to be a big mistake. We’d also set up the email on the domain so that any message addressed to an account that didn’t exist (such as totalloser@ourdomain) still came through to our inbox. That was also a big mistake.
As I am now divorced the old web site no longer exists, but it is still an active domain and I still use it for most of my emails. I’ve only had my new domain for a few weeks, so I haven’t publicised it to that many people yet. So far this month, I have received, to the old domain, 14782 spam emails. That’s over 800 a day.
Earlier this year I acquired an old Celeron 300 PC from my brother and built a linux from scratch system on it. This system is used as an email gateway and spam filter. I use spamassassin (using basically the default settings) to spot all the spam and file it away in a separate folder. So far this month it has identified 12646 messages as spam, a hit rate of 85.5%. However, this means that I still get over 100 unwanted emails a day in my inbox.
Gradually I will unsubscribe my old email address from various mailing lists etc and resubscribe under my new address. I’m not going to put that address anywhere on this blog in the hope that I don’t get inundated with spam generated by spider programs that trawl web sites harvesting email addresses.
Email on the new domain has been set up to send all emails not specifically addressed to me into a black hole, however my new address shouldn’t be too hard to work out if anyone were to spend a few minutes thinking about it. If spam becomes a problem again, I’m going to change my email address to something completely random, in which case I can probably ditch this spam filtering system I spent many long evenings (ok 14 long evenings) setting up and testing.
And if that happens, I’m going to have a spare Celeron 300 PC and a spare broadband firewall/router. I’ll find some use for it though, don’t worry.
In conclusion, I will leave you with another irc quote from bash.org:
<Fooz> In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.