A new level of spam insanity....

I had 29,159 messages in a mailbox today. That's e-mail that all got received within a single 24-hour period. Wait, no. Strike that. It was an 8 1/2 hour period. That's 214 megabytes of spam. Almost a quarter gig. That's insanity.

Of these twenty nine thousand messages, fully 28,401 of them were filtered away by my spam filters as "this is definitely spam". Plus 4 more that it marked that way, but with a glitch that caused them not to actually get auto-deleted. Another 528 had a 0.999 or higher rating on the 0-is-non-spam, 1-is-spam scale, which isn't actually "auto-deleted", because I feed those back to my spam filter so they'll be more likely to get a full-on 1 the next time. Thus, I have 226 messages left that I might want to actually at least glance at. That's too much spam to look at, though, so I send straight to the filters another 84 messages that are scored at 0.99-and-up.

Another 94 are marked as "Spam", but with a lower score than that. Taking a quick glance at these (mostly looking at the recipient address, as that's often a good indicator for me, since I have a wildcard recipient setup), I confirm they're all spam and feed them to my filters.

That leaves 48 left marked as "Unsure" (specific scores of these messages ranged from 0.415 (two of these) to 0.849234 -- it's rare that any of my not-actually-spam messages get scored above about 0.53 (and only 9 of the spam messages were below that range), and the highest I've ever gotten was 0.829141).

Frankly, I was able to dispense of the 48 "Unsure" messages with about the same amount of care as the "Spam but below 0.99" ones... not much. Still, it takes me a minute or two to go through that, and that's not even counting the several (15?) minutes it took for my filtering software to score those 29K messages, and my auto-deleter to auto-delete most of them.

Spam needs to stop. I suspect the only way to stop it is with international laws against it. Who do I write to? My congressional representatives? This is insane.