Foo - Is it just me, or is there an avalanche of...

...SPAM!

My email account has been hammered and the spam folder (which I do have to check just in case of 'false positives') has been full since Christmas.

Are the spammers out in force on the holidays, or am I just being unlucky? Anyone else?

did you sign up or enter your email address into any webpage recently?

I've had the same hotmail account for over ten years and still don't receive much spam. Go figure.

I'll bet it's your bank selling your email address to raise money...

Thankfully, spam has been slow on my usual E-mail accounts as of recent. I dunno who to give credit though. It could be better blackhole lists, blacklisting by default of dynamic IP address ranges to block zombie bot spew, SPF records, or a number of things.

If you run an Exchange server fabric, Microsoft is extremely proactive with getting new heuristics out to servers, usually weekly if not more often. Exchange 2007 with its antispam rules is pretty thorough with catching stuff, although for enterprise/corporate use, I would recommend a third party A/V product like Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange.

did you sign up or enter your email address into any webpage recently?

Not anything that I can recall.

I keep a separate address for a lot of this stuff, but occasionally you do need to use your 'real' address.

Yeah, I've been inundated the last 2 weeks with promises of greater size, growth, new improved performance abilities, etc. Frankly I'm a bit insulted with their insinuations.

Much of the stuff has been about holiday related stuff (gift vouchers, sales, pretending to be major dept. stores etc - mostly scam stuff preying on the time of year), so I thought it might just be a seasonal thing.

I've had the same Hotmail account since Hotmail's inception. No spam. Would you like to know why? I only give my email address to people I know. Ironically I only use it for messenger now and use gmail's email. But you get my point.