I have come to a startling conclusion after spending over 12 years of my life having an @domain.com email address: the only software worse than spam filtering software is the spam sending software! We are all familiar with the problems with spam filtering software; false positives, false negatives, reliance upon third party spam lists or whitelists that ignore the idea that my friends change email addresses, etc. etc. etc. But the fact that spam software itself is so bad just amazes me.

Every day, I get around 90 spam emails. I have zero spam filters, on purpose. I have a cache of spam from 2000 or so; it would date back to about 1996 except for a failure to properly backup a while ago. I suspect that one day I will be able to monetize it somehow, maybe to study market trends or possibly to write a novel. Who knows? But one thing that consistently strikes me is all of the malformed spam mails I get. Like it is pre-beta junk. “Hello < %EMAIL_ADDRESS%>!