A very short story to add to “horrors of spam”.
Nowadays all my email accounts together get about 300 spam/phishing messages a day, most of it from script kiddies in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. They’re boringly similar and instantly recognizable, and almost all are caught by my two email service providers with very few false positives or negatives. They far outweigh my wanted mail, but at least they’re simple to handle.
Some years ago I was a member of a professional computing association and through it had an email account with a valuable name, which I’d gotten by signing up for an account immediately when the association began offering email to members. For quite a while I had no trouble with it: it got no more spam than I could easily deal with. The association’s filtering was handled by a third party, but that third party wasn’t very effective, so I still had to handle most of my own.
Then suddenly one day I got hundreds of spams. It was inconvenient, but I could still handle it, because they were so recognizable. (Which spam still is, everywhere.) Then the next day it was thousands. The spam was still recognizable, but it was tedious to find the wanted mail in among the spam.
Then it got worse; the flood became overwhelming. It got worse and worse. My computer was no longer able to download all my mail, so I had to switch to downloading only the first lines. The association was unable to help me. Things got totally out of hand.
Over 7 weeks my mail got more than 3,000,000 spam messages, and to this day I’ve no idea why. But because the association could do nothing to help, I had to close that account and drop the address. RIP. The episode led me to organize differently how I handle my personal and non-personal email, using techniques that have worked well for me for a long time now. (Hint: I pay a reputable provider for my main email service, where I set up my own separate email account names for different target areas of correspondents. It’s well worth the money, which falls far below what many people spend on junk food or bottled water.)