Aaron Pratt has published am open invitation for friends and complete strangers to spam his Gmail account.
How long does it take to fill up 1 Gig of storage with spam? How well do Gmail’s junk filters work? Let’s find out! Spam my shiny new G-mail account at prattboy@gmail.com Give my address to spammers, newsletters, annoying people, whatever, and let’s see how long it takes!
It’s an amusing conceit, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how spam filters work. Newsletters and annoying people are not, by definition, spam (which is unsolicited commercial email). In fact, if someone gives Aaron’s email address to a marketer (let’s not call them a spammer yet), don’t they have a right to at least send an email to Aaron asking him to complete the opt-in process? If they use a single opt-in, of course, he’s in at that point.
And from Aaron’s comments, it appears that some people are forwarding their spam to him, which in the process removes a lot of the spam’s spamminess. If I receive a piece of spam and forward it to you, it will come from me, through my email servers, with a legitimate set of mail headers. By contrast, the original spam was probably (almost certainly) sent with forged headers, through a server that was either an open relay or a hijacked zombie PC, and in either case it was probably on someone’s black-hole list.
If Google filters spam exclusively on the basis of content, they’re about five years behind the times. And I think we can be pretty sure that that’s not the case. So if a lot of spam seems to be sneaking into Aaron’s Gmail inbox, well, it may not be all Google’s fault.
Fun read. But not even close to a legitimate evaluation.
Ed Bott 