So, I now have a full calendar month under the protection of spamstopshere.com, and I thought I’d take a minute to update on how it’s been working.

1,206,830

One Million, Two Hundred Six Thousand, Eight Hundred and Thirty.

That’s the number of spam emails that did NOT make it thru to my domain. In one month. 31 days. That’s an average of 38,930 a day, or 1,622 an hour. There was one day where spamstopshere.com blocked 82,202 spam emails. In one day.

Unbelievable.

Just for comparison, 2,938, or 0.24% of all email traffic for the month of January, were “good” emails, and did make it thru. It also stopped 12 emails that contained viruses. Doesn’t worry me too much, but my dad runs Windows XP and 2000 on his machines, so he could’ve been affected.

It absolutely bewilders me how bad the spam problem has become, and that we’ve been able to do nothing more than intelligent filtering to stem the tide. Remember from my earlier post on the subject, there were points where I was receiving so much inbound junk mail that it was literally crashing my server. Not any more. My mail logs have grown less over the course of the past 35 some-odd days than they used to hourly. It’s been great.

At least in the snail-mail business, I don’t pay for the amount of inbound mail, the sender pays so there’s a “natural” valve. But because of the proliferation of shoddy operating systems that allow their host computers to become infected with malware email sending bots, the purveyors of this garbage have a virtually unlimited ability to push these bits thru the internet.

So, as I received the email that my trial period was ending, I gladly entered my credit card number into their system to sign me up as a paying customer. It bothers me that I have to pay to block something like this. However, I don’t begrudge a service like spamstopshere.com at all and will gladly pay them for the valuable service they provide.

The only reason the spammers keep at it is there’s money to be made. We need to choke off their air. Don’t ever purchase anything from someone who sent you an email you didn’t first ask them to send. And make sure your O/S is clean and your machine is not inadvertently pushing this spam at the behest of the spammers.

Rant off. I’m happy with spamstopshere.com. If you don’t have a spam solution, give them a try.