James has been at the front for fighting spam for several years now. On his web site he lists the amount of spam he gets daily. After yesterday influx, he's made these comments:
Recently spammers have started dictionary attacks on sagarmatha.com. This is where they try to send to random names. Originally, this attack was aimed at large sites like aol.com, hotmail, etc, because you could be relatively certain of a hit.On sagarmatha, valid addresses almost exclusively end up with me, and invalid ones bounce. Fortunately, sendmail is smart enough to know that if mail comes in, in a single session, for multiple addresses aliased to the same address, only one copy is delivered. However, there are still a fair number of bounces for bad addresses...
Anyway, the result is that yesterday set a new record for personal spam for me, with 626 pieces of spam, either delivered, or filtered. (I'd estimate fewer than 50 made it through my filters.) That's a lot of bandwidth to be wasted (and paid for!) for junk.
I don't see an end to it. I don't know how long I will wish to retain email, when it is gradually being lost to so-called marketing efforts. We've lost the battle, and now we have a means for the sleazy marketers to send their scams postage due.