Spam on the increase?

Anyone else noticed that the spam they’re getting has increased in volume significantly in the past couple of months?

I am theorizing that CDs of ‘harvested’ email addresses have suddenly got much cheaper, or are being marketed better. Anyone know any better?

It’s bloody annoying. And if you’re reading this, spammers, no I do not want to increase my ejaculation, copy DVDs, see women getting jiggy with horses, remortgage my house, get a new credit card, earn cash from home, or import rice!!!

More likely that your email address has just found its way onto a list that’s getting actively traded around the gutter life of the internet.

You’re going to have to learn to live with it, I’m still getting spam in an email address I haven’t personally used for over three years. Except it isn’t spam. Oh no. It’s always “in reply to my query” and “information I’ve requested”.

This is IMHO, of course. :slight_smile:

Hmm… I would agree if I only had one account.

However, I have a silly number of email addresses: at my office I have my personal one, my webmaster@ one, and info@. I also have two hotmail addresses, a mymail account, and a yahoo account. I only ever use the hotmail one for posting stuff on the web, but all 7 (:confused: why??!?) accounts have getting vastly more spam since about August.

Spam is on the increase. Estimates are that anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of internet traffic is spam, and increases every year. Spam will keep on increasing until something is done to control it - while it’s a consequence-free, low cost, high exposure method of advertising, people will keep exploiting it.

Eventually, if the anti-spammers are right, we will face massive internet outages caused by spam runs chewing all available bandwidth and clogging up the lines. These outages are predicted to last a number of days and inconvenience thousands of net users. The antis are hoping that legislation will be introduced at some point to stem the tide, but at the moment few politicians seem interested.

On a personal note, I’ve seen spam jump from one or two emails a week to 8 a day over the last few years. This isn’t on the same account, just on accounts given similar exposure to the net.

I’ve personally been getting at least 2-3x the spam I was before… like my email address just got transfered around the internet in a day or two… starting 3 or 4 weeks ago.

Actually, mine has nearly stopped.
It’s odd, but I almost miss it. Used to be I’d curse every time I opened my mail, but now days go by with nothing, and it seems like I’m acting “needy” to keep checking.

How did that happen? I realized almost all the spam was coming from my personal web page. Fortunately, I had that address as a spare on Yahoo that forwarded to my main ISP account. I just changed to a new alternate account. Since all my former correspondents have my ISP mail now, it’s not a problem ignoring the old account.

I also am not getting anywhere near the amount of spam I used to. Well, actually I AM, but it doesn’t go to my main account. What I did was set up a hotmail account that I use ONLY for signing up for services, or entering on web pages, etc, basically anytime I’m at a site that wants my e-mail address for something, I give them the hotmail address. I only check the account when I know that something I need is going to it, so it never bothers me. My normal ISP account stays remarkably free of spam. Maybe 1 a week, that’s it.

Yeah, it’s gotten much worse lately. I went from about 5 per day to a record of 95 spams in one day! I just saw this increase about 3 or 4 weeks ago.

Yeah, I’ve been getting more spam lately. I used to get maybe 15-20 a day, now it is almost 30-40.

I’m getting more of that Nigerian scam bullshit. I forward it to “abuse@xxx,” but that doesn’t seem to stop it. I recently installed Zone Alarm, & it’s interesting to see all the entities that try to probe my ports. I’m hoping Zone Alarm will stop some of the possible spam by preventing others from getting my email addresses. I may be off on the tech here.

My anecdotal subjective response is that, yes, I seem to be also getting a lot more spam. Any other objective responses to the question?