I’m usually pretty good about answering my email, but lately I’m noticing that people are asking me about emails I’ve never seen. Since most people who write probably assume I just didn’t answer, I’m really worried that I’m losing a lot of my email.<\/p>\n
I use Mozilla Thunderbird, because it has a built-in spam filter. I get hundreds of spams a day, so manual filtering just isn’t an option. I suspect that the number of spams is so dense and the ratio of spams to real emails is so high that the adaptive filter now thinks that most of the words in the english language are no-no spam words. The spam filter will allow emails from people in my address book, but that just means that my address book is a whitelist. People who email me for the first time have no way to ensure I get the email except to tell me about it elsewhere.<\/p>\n
So, if you’ve sent me an email for the first time and I never replied then I apologize. I never saw it. <\/p>\n
As I was looking into this, I noticed my spam count is very<\/em> stable. I took a few random samples from the last month and found I get a steady supply of 383 to 387 spams per day. That’s only a 1% variance from day to day. Strange. <\/p>\n And now as I was doing THAT I realized that I just screwed up my spam filter. I accidently marked all of my spam from the past month as “not spam<\/a>“, meaning I just taught the adaptive filter that it should allow all of this stuff. <\/p>\n Arg.<\/p>\n