I’m out of Gmail space! The gigabyte is gigabitten, gigagone. No, really, it is. No mas, zilch, nadda. They say it should last 3-5 years, but it lasted me only 3 months.

Gmail has been criticized for some silly things IMO but probably one of the truly worst missing features of Gmail is the one that will affect those who get a moderate to large amount of daily email. The more email you receive, the more spam you get, that’s the way it is these days. These Gmail users won’t realize this is that big of a deal until the email starts to back up into the thousands and realize: wait, there’s no way to “delete forever” more than 50 emails at a time. Quickly the Gmail storage will fill up until it become full. Then you’ll get messages about how it will only accept 10 days worth of email and start being rejected.

For 3 months from May 12, 2004 - Aug 13, 2004 I held an experiment by routing email from an Earthlink mailbox that I’ve have had since 1998 and a couple of our domains through my new Gmail account. I never published this Gmail address in newsgroups or on the web or asked anybody to send it spam. So the numbers that follow are real world numbers that include no artificially generated spam. This was strictly a real test of how much mail — spam and/or otherwise – I was receiving through regular use of these mail accounts.

The result
Over the course of 90 days I ran out the 1 GB of storage space that comes with GMail. This space they claim for “average users” should last 3-5 years (”5″ is the number used in their FAQ docs). The result of this fillup was a bulk amount of spam emails totalling 239,329 spam emails [screenshot] which worked out to be in excess of 92% of the mail I received over this time. And some of this email spam was filtered first by Earthlink! Now the next problem:

So how do I get rid of all this spam quickly, easily and with the least time possible? The answer: there didn’t seem to be any way to delete more than 50 ’spam’ (or any categorized) emails at one time. At a dizzying rate of over 2,500+ spam emails coming in daily and only deleting 50 emails at a time, I did a quick time test to see how fast I could delete emails through GMail’s system. Hold onto your seats, I was able to delete a rather pathetic 400 emails a minute on average using my speedy cable connection. So I did the math:

239,329 / 400 emails per minute = 598.32 minutes / 60 minues = 9.97 straight hours
2500 a day / 400 emails = 6 wasted minutes every day deleting spam.
6 wasted minutes a day x 365 days = 2190 minutes per year (36.98 hours a year)

Anybody up for a spam deleting party?! Yikes, this would take nearly 10 straight hours of nonstop, continuous button clicking, waiting and more button clicking just to delete completely worthless spam gathered over a 3 month period. Nearly 10 straight hours of lost productive business time just to be able to free up my much heralded 1GB Gmail space for using again! No way was this a realistic use of anybody’s time in life or a worthwhile treadmill to get on. The Gmail Team must have through this issue, didn’t they? I did some more research.

The Gmail FAQ section didn’t turn up any answers so I decided to send the Google team the following email:

Subject: How to delete more than 50 spams at one time
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:32:01 -0000

Spam has filled up my Gmail limit in 3 months (nearly 240,000 spam to be more precise). I now need to delete this out of the spam folder at one time. Is there any way to delete more than 50 spams at a time?

QuestionTopic: spam
Name: TDavid
OS: winxp
Browser: Internet Explorer 6.x

One of the first things I received from the GMail team was a canned autoresponder which left me in serious doubt that I’d ever see a response from them:

Thank you for your message. We regret that the volume of incoming inquiries we have received has prompted this general auto-reply. We hope that this message will provide the information you need. Although we cannot respond to every inquiry, we read each individual message, and thank you for taking the time to send us your comments and suggestions.

Your feedback is important to us, and all feature requests and suggestions for improvement are forwarded to the appropriate teams.

“Volume of email they receive” — I love it! Isn’t that ironic? To my astonishment, within 1 business day, I received a personalized answer from the Gmail Team just now about this issue:

—–Original Message—–
From: Gmail Team
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2004 3:48 PM
Subject: Re: [#13269523] How to delete more than 50 spams at one time
Hello TDavid,

Thank you for your message.

While Gmail does not currently support the functionality to delete the entire contents of ‘Spam,’ we are testing many new features to improve the Gmail service. You might be interested to hear that we are working on the following:

- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account
- Plain HTML version of Gmail
- Export Contacts

We hope you enjoy Google’s approach to email.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

I’m grateful for their response but none of those features really help me or my situation.  In fact, There’s no way anybody who gets any significant amount of spam is going to like this. I urge anybody reading this with a  blog or who knows somebody with a blog to send them a link to my story here and urge them to contact the Gmail beta team and ask them to do something about some sort of mass deletion feature. I realize that this type of feature could be disastrous for somebody who didn’t want to delete their precious email but there should be a button for dumping the spam button swiflty and easily — ok, maybe make the user re-enter in his/her password to confirm the mass deletion, but only allowing users to do this 50 at a time is insane.

In the meantime, my GMail account is now pretty much worthless until they fix this feature or I just get some crazy urge to spend a couple days (I doubt that I have the stamina — or anybody has the stamina — to sit in front of the PC in a mad deleting frenzy) deleting spam 50 messages at a time for nearly 10 nonstop hours.

Please send your friends with Gmail a link to this story, write a note on your blog about this story, and all us Gmail users unite to encourage the Gmail Team to please solve this mass deletion issue before Gmail leaves beta.

In my case, I think the percentage is closer to 90%. In fact, I’m quickly closing in on filling up Gmail’s one gig of email space with regular inbox flow; this morning’s check showed some 93% of the 1 gig has been consumed. vnunet.com

Sixty-five per cent of all emails sent in June 2004 were spam - up from just eight per cent three years ago, according to email monitoring company Brightmail. The steady increase in spam rates shows no sign of slowing, and existing legislation such as the US Can Spam Act will have little effect, claimed the company.

So this is where all that AOL spam was coming from? The good news: credit cards were in a different database. Washington Post:

A 24-year-old software engineer at America Online Inc. was arrested yesterday on federal charges that he hacked into the company’s computers to steal 92 million e-mail addresses that were later sold and used to bombard AOL members with spam.

Seriously, the last year or two spam at AOL has decreased (in our experience when we used their service) so AOL should be commended on their efforts to crack down on this stuff. It used to be you register a new AOL screenname and within a week you were getting hammered with spam.

I understand the irritation over the whole Instant Message (IM) spam thing, but what about the Trillian users who want to use the client to save time? This Yahoo move seems short sighted. I would think these other companies could work together with Trillian in locking down these spammers.

Yahoo said it will continue changing its protocols to prevent clients such as Trillian from finding new ways to incorporate Yahoo. Again, the measure was cited by Yahoo as a way to prevent IM spam.

It is disturbing, however, that this article further notes that Trillian “didn’t respond” to its inquiries. If this is true, this isn’t keeping the lines of communication open.

I never really thought about this one. Spam has an even worse effect on the blind who must listen to the subject line of every email and can’t just quickly scan subject lines. Some of them are giving up completely on email:

Listening to the next message in the inbox may reveal an important letter from an old friend or, more often, an embarrassing ad for penis-enhancement therapy. …

A government-run “Do Not Spam” registry would only generate more unwanted e-mail because unscrupulous marketers would simply treat it as a source of leads, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday.

In other words, if there was a guaranteed way of identifying and authenticating the source of the sending emails, they might endorse it, but because of proxies and other deceptive spamming techniques, they can’t get behind it at this time. In the meantime, Bill Gates says he will rid the web in under 600 days of spam. We’ll keep the countdown going (see lefthand side of main page for the countdown).

If you aren’t surfing with you Internet Explorer condom (that’s a joke, people), then now is a better time than ever. winnetmag:

A malicious adware creator is taking advantage of two vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) to surreptitiously install adware products and pop-up ad generators on users’ computers as they browse the Web. The flaws, which let attackers run code on victims’ machines and let malicious code bypass IE’s security zones, were only recently discovered.

I know, I know, switch to another browser, but the numbers still say that despite these issues the highest percentage of people don’t. Why do you think this is?

Sounds like it’s time to start kicking some more subscribers out or at least cutting off their email services until they get their computers out of zombie mode.

Now someone from Comcast is confirming it. “We’re the biggest spammer on the Internet,” network engineer Sean Lutner said at a meeting of an antispam working group in Washington, D.C., last week. Lutner said Comcast users send out about 800 million messages a day, but a mere 100 million flow through the company’s official servers. Almost all of the remaining 700 million represent spam erupting from so-called zombie computers–a breathtaking figure that adds up to six or seven spam-o-grams for each American family every day.

Personal responsibility in computing is no small deal and many netizens are paying the price for negligent users.

Set your mail filters to ignore: worm/MiMail.A, also known as W32.Mimail.A@mm is out in the internet wild and coming to an email box near you. It is disguising itself as a zip file. Here’s something I started doing many months ago: not opening attachments from anybody unless I know they are coming. Business associates I will write back and ask them what they sent.

Chris Pirillo is quoted in this article as saying: “E-mail is a polluted medium. It’s dead.” This is coming from a guy who grew his business based on email newsletters. Mr. Pirillo raises a good point: email is saturated, there is too much garbage in and garbage out and even folks who want to receive your information and communication are likely having trouble doing so. He is pointing to RSS as the new frontier. I don’t think legislating spammers is going to help much, but I do think that more folks moving to a whitelist, as I have been thinking about quite seriously lately, could be a good move. These confirmation mail services could be an idea as well.