In March, I received 56,751 pieces of mail. This includes mail to me at samgreenfield.com and mail to the unhinged.org domain that I do not forward off. unhinged.org contains a catch-all. Of the 56,751 pieces of mail, I immediately discarded 25,808. These messages were obviously bogus for one reason or another and also include bounced messages that were forged from my domains.
27,058 pieces of mail were classified as spam by Spam Assasin and were filed into a Junk folder that I never check. I read most of the remaining 3,885 messages on gmail. Gmail does a pretty great job of filtering out spam, so I only skim through the messages in the Junk folder there. However, I do save a record of the messages, and in the end assesment I was left with around 531 messages that I would consider “legitimate.”
But it gets even better. Of the 531 messages that I consider real, 430 of them are what we would traditionally considered on the verge of junk mail. For example, I received 11 messages from Sears in the month of March. I’m not counting “real” email such as billing notifications in the 430 messages.
At the very end of the day, I’m left with 101 email messages that I consider worth reading. Or 0.18% of the mail I receive through my personal accounts.
In April, I used 228 words in 4 paragraphs to say “I get a crap-load of spam.”