About a month ago a coworker offered me a Gmail invitation. Although I prefer to use a regular IMAP mail client to access my mail, I figured I’d take him up on the offer and reserve a reasonable email address.
The next time I logged into Gmail was this morning. Of course I had no new messages in my inbox, which is not surprising since I’d never given this address to anyone.
I did, however, have a piece of spam. Received less than three weeks after creating the Gmail address. Which (to repeat) I never gave to anyone. And which uses a different account name than the one I normally use (at which I get about 750 pieces of spam a month).
By the way, Gmail’s filters had caught the spam. Good to know, and no less than I’d expect, really. So if I post a feedback link to this blog, I may well use that address instead.
But really, the whole thing was quite breathtaking. They say 75% of the traffic that crosses the Internet these days is spam. I’m beginning to think it’s time to chuck SMTP and invent a new, fully authenticating mail protocol.