1M+ Spam Emails Per Month!
Whoa!! I just got a rather surprising (to me) warning from Gmail. It reads:
You are almost out of space for your Gmail account.
You can view our tips on reducing your email storage or purchase additional storage.
As I said, this was a bit of a surprise to me. When I first began using Gmail, I kept a close eye on my storage usage, but it used to climb so slowly that I soon forgot all about it. But upon seeing the above message, I quickly glanced down to read:
You are currently using 6989 MB (95%) of your 7356 MB.
Now of course, there's no way I'm using 7GB for email... I'm just not that busy!! ;)
So a glance to the left this time, and sure enough, there's been an explosion of spam of late... indeed, I now have 1,034,188 spam messages.
Admittedly, I haven't cleaned them out for well over two years. Gmail automatically deletes all spam messages more than 30 days old, so at some point (I thought) spam would reach a rough equilibrium, with new spam messages roughly equaling spam messages being automatically deleted. And indeed, this has been the case for quite some time... I have often glanced across and observed that my received spam increases just very slightly month to month, but nothing like this.
To look at it another way, according to Gmail I have received more than one million spam messages in the past 30 days!!! Now surely that has to be some kind of record!! :|
I just did a quick random sample, and it seems that all of these spam messages were indeed addressed to me (I have a number of different addresses that all go to my Gmail account)... so it's not just Gmail playing up :(
Ah well, time to hit that "Delete all spam messages now" link... I wonder how long it will take... probably a fraction of a second?
Technorati Tags: Trackback URL for this post:
http://colby.id.au/trackback/144
They're still flowin'
In the several minutes it took me to write the above post, I received another 163 spam messages... that's pretty quick.
All I can say, thank God for Gmail... I'd be totally stuffed trying to deal with this much spam any other way! ;)
More than 10 seconds
Hmm... so I hit the "Delete all spam messages now" link.
It's been 30 seconds so far...
Gmail is saying its regular "Oops... the system encountered a problem - Retrying now..." message...
I guess Gmail is not used to deleting one million message at once! ;)
Temporary Error (503)
Just tried Gmail in another browser window... just in case the Gmail has finished, but the first window doesn't know it yet. Got:
Temporary Error (503) - We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.
Hmm... again, I guess Gmail's not used to deleting 1M+ messages at once ;)
5 minutes and counting
Well, it's now been just over 5 minutes... Gmail (presumably) still working on deleting all those spam messages. My account is till unavailable (Temporary Error 503), and I'm sleepy... so I'm off to bed. Surely my email will be back online in the morning... won't it? :|
All's well that ends well
Ok, so when I finally got 'round to going to bed, Gmail had been "trying" for just over 32 minutes. But when I awoke this morning, it had successfully deleted all 1M+ spam messages... now I just have 11,143 new spam messages to delete ;)
BTW, who thinks 32+ minutes is a reasonable amount of time to "delete all" one million email messages? I'm certainly not going to complain about an excellent, free service, but it does seem quite slow for Google - surely one million messages would be nothing to them! But perhaps Gmail is heavily optimised for reading, and not deleting; or perhaps the just (sensibly) throttle individual user actions... ?
Wow.
That's an impressive volume of spam.
Glad you sorted it out, though. (For now).
spam/=2;
Well it's been a little over 30 days now, and my gmail spam has re-settled at just under 500,000 messages.
So either gmail has improved its spam filtering, or I've stopped being targeted by some useless spam botnet... I'm guessing the latter, but I'm happy either way ;)
Post new comment