Andre

I admit it: I am an email receiver. I do receive emails, some more and some less important, daily. Occasionally, I even send some. Nowadays, one almost dares not to tell anyone about it because of the flood of unwanted emails arriving minutes after the world knows someone's email address, or even just the domain name. Holding a couple of domain names on my own mail server, I noticed a couple of odd things and I met 2 new friends.

First, there are the spam sender names such as molliedistilleryroper or any other garbage mix of letters and numbers, attached to existing or fake domain names; in some cases even a non-existant account at my very own domain. It sometimes happens that the sender pretends to be the same email as the target. Like I would send spam to myself...

Funny are the destination addresses, which are made up of the same combinations as the senders, with one notable difference: the majority of the destination names are quite funny:

• son
• catchthismail
• thisisjusttestmessageatall
• iamjustsendingthisleter

There are surprisingly few emails addressed to my correct address.

Meet my 2 best friends in all things email: catch-all and site_blackhole. While all incoming email not matching an existing account is forwarded by default to catch-all, they are being destroyed by site_blackhole. In fact, catch-all is an alias for site_blackhole, so all that spam just disappears. End of their digital life.

At best, 5% of an average of 1500 incoming emails per day are not spam, or at least not falling into the spam category (some long-forgotten signed-up newsletters...). Looking at the pattern of incoming email quantities, it emerges that the spam flood spikes every 2-4 days; going up and down between those peaks in an orderly manner (not randomly). On the long run, the quantity grows but the 2-4 days pattern remains the same.