One piece of spam every 9 minutes

This morning, I deleted the 3600 spam that were sitting in my Gmail Spam folder. Lo and behold, 2h15 2h22m later I have 15 16 new ones promising to sell me cheap electronics, software, pharmaceuticals, watches, orgasms, and debt forgiveness. More and more, I am agreeing with people like Fred Wilson and his kids who are no longer using email. And in the ongoing Bayesian filter wars, the spammers seem to be winning because I have to mark a lot of my spam as such manually because Gmail thinks it’s not Spam. This is with the first billion people online. Don’t think it will get any better with the next billion coming online and thinking, “Wow! I can send this out to 2 billion people and it costs me nothing!!!!!!”

There are some great comments following Fred’s post questioning whether asynchronous (time-shifted) modes like email might be better for allowing people not to be interrupted (the reason I prefer email to IM); and whether IM will remain spam free going forward (my bet is that it will get saturated very quickly but somewhat less quickly than email.)

Good thoughts and comments.

I would like to see a State of the Union update from the technology leaders in this area. Are we getting anywhere with this?

And here’s another image from Ross Mayfield’s Flickr page that sums it up quite nicely: