The spam really is getting worse

[indigo_rose99]

In December I started feeling like the spam I get was becoming... more frequent. Being a statistician, this is the kind of thing that is provable with data. I used to graph the number of spam emails I get on a chart. It had gotten better and I slacked off. But in December I did a data pull.

The following is a control chart (a fancy time ordered plot). Each point is the number of spam emails I got on that day. I've separated the data into 2012 (when I used to collect data), Oct/Nov 2015 and now. The green and red lines are mostly for reference. But if you are interested, the green line is an average and the red lines are +/- 3 standard deviations from the average. In theory, for a process that has no outside force driving it (an evil human doing this to me!!!), points should fall randomly between the red lines that I set up in 2012.


Now I believe that someone has decided to use my actual email address as a spam dump. I am receiving frequent repeated emails from vendors who have the persistent belief that I came to their website and signed up for something, giving them my email address. Every day or so a new vendor joins the chorus.

So the graph shows that the process has actually changed. I'm not crazy, it really changed in the past month. *sigh* 

Comments

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I am always having people sign up for mailing lists and other things using my e-mail address. I assume they forgot they had to stick in extra initials or numbers or something and just use my plain address. Why-oh-why is firstname.lastname@gmail.com considered the same address as firstnamelastname@gmail.com? If they weren't, that would take care of 98% of my problem.

But I wonder why that's happening to your e-mail address? I try to write back and tell the sender that they have the wrong e-mail address. I enjoy signing these e-mails "The Wrong Debbie." But of course I often get e-mails from "do not reply" e-mails, which should be illegal. Unsubscribing helps a lot. But there are so MANY stupid Debbies in the world that I'm working on switching to a new e-mail address. Unfortunately, all my google docs are connected to the bad address, and I can't figure out how to transfer them. (Well, I supposedly did, but it didn't work.) So I think I'm going to have to re-create the things I want to keep, involving logging in and out of the two e-mails. Which obviously I have been putting off because Ugh. I hope you do not have to do that.

My condolences and best of luck to you!