Today, on the date of the 20th anniversary of the publication of RFC822, let me say a word or two about spam. Many say "oh, quit whining, just delete it." For the "oh quit whining, just delete it" crowd, let me note this. I currently get something like 150 to 200 spams a day. That is not a misprint. I use tools to nuke most of it, but some still gets through -- luckily not much. Perhaps you have no clear idea of what that means to a person. Let me give it to you in concrete terms. If I tried to handle that much spam by hand, I'd be losing a week of my life this year. "What!" you say, "that's impossible!" No, it isn't. You're just not thinking about it. If I used no tools, I would currently be viewing something like 55,000 spams a year. Assuming I took perhaps three seconds each to say "oh, this is spam" and delete those messages, that would be something like 165,000 seconds per year, or about 46 hours of my life -- thats about a standard work week. Note for comparison that Americans typically get two weeks vacation a year. I think the three seconds estimate is not unreasonable, by the way. Note also that the curve is such that I'll get far more than that this year -- I'm just giving you an instantaneous snapshot of current volume. Now, I get a lot more spam than most people do -- I post to a lot of mailing lists and to Usenet and I run a lot of mailing lists. However, that just means I'm a year or two ahead of you on the curve, which records seem to show is exponential. If you aren't getting that much remember: as I am now, you shall be in 12 or 24 or 36 months. The curve is exponential. Bear that in mind. (This is not just me measuring this. Erik Fair claims to me in a private communication that his own volume, which is less than mine, is double last years and is well over 12000 for the year already, with many months left to go -- it could be as much as three times the volume he measured last year.) Now, I have strong tools, but the spam volumes are rising VERY fast, and the amount that evades my tools is getting to perhaps 10 a day. That's three hours out of my life every year spent on this, not counting the time I spend maintaining anti-spam tools which is considerable. If current trends continue, I can expect the volume to at least have doubled or more by the end of the year, so I can fully expect to be hitting the point where my current tools are inadequate very soon. As for the tools, they are not going to get much better. If I tune mine to be much stronger, I will start blocking legitimate mail. I am already blocking some once in a while, and any is almost certainly too much. Anyone who claims this is not a problem and I'm a whiner who should just delete mail I don't like is not considering the scope of the problem. The problem is real, folks. It can no longer be ignored. If you think it is not a problem, because you're "only" getting a couple of spams a day, you are being hopelessly naive. If electronic mail is to continue as a viable communications medium, we have to stop this problem, and soon. Perry