Day Job Spam

I spend a portion of my week at a little services company, where business is rather - well, slow. OK - it's really, really, really slow. To be honest, I'd rather be working to block junk messages, or on my robots.

On the other hand, I could still use the extra cash. It's a good thing employers never read anything their employees ever write on the internet!

But back to the point.

In May of this year I only got about 5 or 6 pieces of junk daily at my day job's account. Now I get more like 35. The difference is significantly above any margin of error.

Due to prior issues with false positives, I've configured our email server to accept almost any email. The only thing I've done to minimize junk is to block messages from certain countries.

My other data indicates that spam levels are up - but not by a factor of 7x.

The only secondary level of defense is Outlook's spam filter. I'm using it in its most conservative mode. In the past, it caught good amount of the junk - but it seems to be less effective now.

It seems Outlook spam filtering isn't doing what it used to. One possible reason for this is that Outlook's filtering is probably the most commonly used and therefore most likely to be tested by spammers. If spammers figure out how to fool the filter that 20% of the market is using, they may increase their deliverability enough to substantially improve their profits.

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