About to pass a dubious milestone ...

[update: 8:49am 27-Jan-2009] Yup … my spam-box is at 20012 and counting. [update 2: 8:29am 31-Jan-2009] 25188 and counting … wassamatta, they couldn’t get me to 30k by the end of the month (16 hours away)? Sheesh … On a positive note, Thunderbird is able to handle 25188 email sized box without problem. I remember when 1000 emails would give email clients fits …

Our spam filter is a pipeline. It can handle quite a load … we have been email bombed before, and far from causing the server conniptions, it handles it quite well.

It tags our mail with a big old [SPAM] in the subject, and other filters redirect this to a specific (per user) mailbox. The mail system discards most of the spam, based on a variety of rules. The roughly 5% of mail that makes it past these rules (and yes, we monitor their effectiveness) runs through our filters. Spam goes into the spam-box. Every month I marvel at the growth. Recently I was amazed that we had crossed more than 10k spams into my personal spam box. Recently. As of today, my spambox for the month of January, is 19211 spam. And growing. 20k here we come. In the 5 minutes I have been typing this, I have received ~8 spam into the box. Amazing.