How much spam do you get?  A lot? Let me give you an idea of how much my email account (bwardell@stardock.com) gets.

Now, you may say, what the hell are you thinking? Why are you putting your email address out there? Am I an idiot? Well yes but that's a different issue entirely. I don't do the bwardell@nospamhereremovestardock.com type thing because as Darth Vader said in Return of the Jedi -- "It's too late for me..."

Long before spam became a real problem, I was on Usenet and zillions of other sites. I used my email address in the clear (like lots of other people).  This year marks the 10th year of my email address.  In that time, I've gotten on every spam list known to mankind. I've had people purposely sign me up for stuff (flamers - don't bother, I'm already signed up to receive it). 

To give you a statistic, yesterday I received 3,914 emails. A typical day.  Previously the spam catchers on our server would get about 90% of the spam. Pretty good right? But I'm still stuck with about 400 email per day.  Of that 400 email per day, about half of it is spam. Of the remaining 200, about half of it is not spam but are lists and notifications or promotions that are legitimate (i.e. junk mail but not spam).   So of the nearly 4000 emails I get, about 100 of it is from people who want a response, presumably that day.  Since I've only got about an hour or two per day to dedicate to checking email, that means I don't get to a lot of people. And I apologize.

But that's getting a little better.  We just purchased the Barracuda. It's a hardware device that sits in front of your mail server to weed out spam. So far, the results are pretty satisfying.  I still get spam, but far far less.  Same with everyone else.  It's about 3pm today so we're about half way done.  So far, our server has received 10,449 emails total. That's everyone.  Barracuda has blocked 8,419 of them because they're spam. 1,378 were blocked because they contain virii. 217 were allowed in but were tagged as probably being spam but it wasn't sure.  That leaves 418 that it thinks are legitimate (and about 25% of them are still probably spam).

For you numbers fans, that means 96% of the email we get is either spam or virii that is can tell is spam or virii. The remaining 4% still has some spam in it, but it's still more effective (so far) than anything I've used before.