dannyman.toldme.com

Spam, Spam, Sausage, Eggs …

Some output from the daily cron job:

  Total  Number Folder
  -----  ------ ------
 664829      90 .spam/
3765099     411 /dev/null
  83557      27 /home/djh/Maildir/
  41492      16 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi dannyman@gmail.com

The first is likely spam, which goes in a “quarantine” folder that I review every few days, catching the occasional “false positive.” The second is definately spam, and /dev/null is a special place on a Unix system that is akin to a black hole or a “circular file.” The next line are messages that are not spam — twenty seven legitimate messages, and sixteen of those are actually addressed to me, and are thus forwarded to the archive of my GMail account.

That’s right kids, around five megabytes of spam per day. Five million “bytes” is five million western characters, or letters, that a computer scans for me automatically to shitcan. I’m not sure whether to be depressed at the spam or marvel that the filters process it so well. The latter is surely the greater achievement!

/danny