Eisenstadt's Analysis Of 8 Years' Worth Of Email

Hylton writes "Thought this might be of interest: Marc Eisenstadt's saved every email he's gotten over the past eight years, including spam, and run an analysis of it."

Comments

Indeed

[mboverload]

I used to NEVER get spam, I didn't know what people were complaining about. I was on a mail server that no spammer really knew about, so there were no dictionary mailings. However, once I posted that paticular email on just a few websites I have been getting ~50 spam a day. There is no way they got my email through me signing up for things because I use a seperate address. I'm just glad the kind of practices they use (trawling the internet for emails) are illegal, although that doesn't mean much.

I will never buy anything from spam, and whoever does has got to be a complete moron.

every month on lug radio

[QuantumG]

One of the guys reminds us that people who send those "increase your penis size" emails and other spam don't just do it because they think it is fun to piss off the world, they do it because they make lots and lots of money from it.

That's what anti-spam laws should be targeting, the morons who use the services offered by spammers.

Not very much

[brunes69]

I rotate my email folders every 6-9 months to increase performance.

Even so, I have 2 folders with over 9000 Emails in them. My work Inbox alone has 1015. None of these are spam - I filter those out through a combination of SpamAssassin and manual filtering.

Anyways - my point is that the numbers in this article are small potatoes. He talks about 250 Emails in a week - I easily get 300 -400 Emails **a day**, probably 40-50 of which are directly work related, the other 350 related to various other side projects of mine, so they are just as important.

I would say I read around 25-50% of my Emails. The rest I only give a cursory scan. His numbers for reply times are way off for a number of reasons:

- Hardly anyone replies to every email they recieve. Most of it needs no reply.

- He basically says that the time spent reading the emails and responding is a waste. Well, what do you think managers did to communicate with you before email? You had faxes, daily memos, daily reports to file... it is just more streamlined now. It is not like this stuff is new.

Newsflash - work is difficult. People are distracting to your work. Shit happens. Deal with it, just like everyone else has for the past 150 years.

Re:If you think this article is about spam, read e

[Tony Hoyle]

It depends on what you use it for.

I work for a company on the other side of the globe.. couldn't do that without email. I also support an opensource project with 10,000 downloads a week... that generates 'a few' support queries :) Heck, without email I don't even think I could do that by phone without hiring a call center.

Re:Femto's Law of Email

[dvdeug]

Given enough time, nearly every email becomes irrelevant.

Given enough time, nearly everything becomes irrelevant. That job resume you're writing up now is going to be pretty irrelevant in 3 years; but that doesn't mean you can ignore it now.

Own domain offers new methods

[4Lancer.net]

Having your own domain offers a neat way of tracking where spam comes from. For example, if you see the email I use here, I will know any spam that comes from someone getting my address from here. Of course, /. isn't the best example. Say I sign up at a website, misfitriprapper.com. I will use misfitriprapper.com as the username before the @4la... I use this method EVERYWHERE. I just sent an email last night to Epson support. My email address? epson.com@4la... We've all learned years ago to not trust anybody, so, I don't even trust the big companies like Epson.