Over the course of the last eight years, I’ve had a very simple email address based on my domain name, and the spammers figured it out pretty early on. The amount of junk I got has been steadily increasing to the point where lately it would take my custom filters and Mail.app’s junk filter about five minutes to sort my incoming mail in the morning. It wasn’t unusual to see 600+ junk mails by the end of a business day, which didn’t seem out of the ordinary for me.

Yesterday I started getting a ton of “Mail Not Delivered” messages coming back to me from various places, and did a little header snooping: the messages weren’t addressed to my account at all, but an foreign account from an old server I used to host on. I contacted my old host and he apologized for the crossed wires; within five minutes the onslaught had dried up and I went from 5 junk mails a minute down to 5 an hour. I hadn’t realized how much of that crap wasn’t even coming to me directly.