This is funny, as I always imagined these things to be made by some nameless author of good old Internet, and never bothered to check and look it up. Further less I expected to stumble upon it by said author's random blogpost where it's not even the primary topic.
It inspires me to work on things that I'm passionate about just for fun. You never know what might come out of it!
I still use my super optimized c++ email filter to this day, 25 years later. Beats anything else I ever tried.
I get ~1000 spams per day. About 1-2 end up in inbox. Every so often I do go through my spam, and while it's possible I've missed something, I generally find less than 1 false positive a month and it's never anything especially important.
I recently got my older kid and his friends hooked on CS2 via steam. I'm considering having a "dads vs kids" tourney because we're at that cross section where all the dads have played CS2 and now some of the kids are getting old enough and good enough to be competitive.
(Also it says a lot that right now my two biggest sources of daily spam are Google Calendar Notifications and Random Firebase Accounts. Both of those further leave me questioning if Google's approach to spam filtering is sincere.)
From my perspective all attempts at fixing anything broke something for smaller senders. Today if you want to host a mail server you can set up everything correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and your email still lands in the spam folder because you have not enough reputation. There are whole IP address segments that a flat out prohibited from participating.
Email is designed to be a distributed system. That means new standards can not really be added without breaking most of the systems. We still don't have mandatory transport encryption. So I don't see how to fix anything but to improve spam filtering and accept that it will be imperfect.
The abuse is by design.
Email providers have better spam filtering, some have strict rules about attaching any kind of executable code to an email (as in - you just can't).
Email clients are always getting updated, stricter about validating content before showing it, etc.
Just took a peek at my spam folder: 207 messages going back to March 18th, two false positives (both from mailing lists), but nothing critical. I think maybe I’ve seen one spam message across all my accounts in my inbox. Their filters benefit from a huge set of trainers on their data.
(As an aside, I would note that some newer addresses that I publish naked on some websites that I maintain get very little spam (14 messages between the two accounts in the same timeframe, most of which are from a single sender who decided that they should send me their press releases without any means of opting out.)
at this point RCS and email are pretty similar on paper.
In my own experience, it’s not particularly often that you find yourself asking your email provider to blackhole your primary, personal email address. But in 2002, a unique series of turn-of-the-millennium events had me doing exactly that to prevent our broadband account from being terminated.
Back then, I was the owner of dv@btinternet.com - proudly so, as all other acceptable variations of “Dave”, “DaveJ”, and my firstname/surname appeared to have been taken by other subscribers to our ISP. To find an available 2-letter username that was vaguely similar to “Dave” felt lucky.
The early 2000s were challenging for email, thanks to the emergence of highly-transmissable email worms. Perhaps most famously, the “ILOVEYOU” worm earned international attention as thousands of computer networks, schools, businesses and communities were brought down - in some cases destroyed - by virtue of this destructive virus deleting files and emailing itself to everyone who happened to be in the address list of any unfortunate (albeit Outlook-using) recipient. Even in 2000, that was millions upon millions of people.
By 2002 these worms had evolved to become considerably more sophisticated - and sneaky - as their authors attempted to spread wider and faster. One of the most devastating changes - at least for my poor, poor inbox - was the ability to source email addresses of potential targets not just from the users address book, but from any and every text-like file on the user’s hard disk.
At this point I was onto my fourth official CS map - Dust 2 - which meant at least 4 mentions of my personal email address in every CS installation. An email address that would pop up every time someone connected to a server running one of my maps, as part of the mission briefing:
Dust - Bomb/Defuse
by DaveJ (dv@btinternet.com)
textures by Macman (MacManInfi@aol.com)
Counter-Terrorists: Prevent Terrorists
from bombing chemical weapon crates.
Team members must defuse any bombs
that threaten targeted areas.
Terrorists: The Terrorist carrying the
C4 must destroy one of the chemical
weapon stashes.
Other Notes: There are 2 chemical
weapon stashes in the mission.
(Press FIRE to continue)
This was de_dust.txt - equivalents existed for Dust 2 and Cobble, plus the overall readme.txt. All contributors to CS had their email listed somewhere in every single installation of the most popular multiplayer FPS of the time, a title primarily installed onto internet-connected computers, during a period of highly virulent email worms that spread exclusively via the internet.
You see where this is going…
My dv@btinternet.com account soon started receiving tens, and then hundreds, of emails a day from worms such as “Klez” - so many that Outlook (mine was patched, thankfully) could no longer load my inbox anymore. I had to use a dedicated POP3 tool that would let me rapidly scan and remove troublesome emails beforehand to let the legitimate ones through. Mercifully, trashable emails were easily identified by common patterns in the subject line, so this only took a few minutes a day to restore inbox access.
Alas, this didn’t last.
Before long those few hundred emails a day I was receiving became thousands of emails a day, which easily occupied the entirety of the at-the-time generous 15MB (megabytes!) of mailbox space so gracefully bestowed to me by BT, our ISP. Worst still, worm authors had become somewhat more creative with their email structure to evade bulk identification and removal, utilising randomly-constructed subject lines, bodies, feigned headers, stolen file attachments, and - most annoyingly - using spoofed sender addresses, again using harvested data from whatever address books and files they came across.
My dad (the actual account holder) started to receive warnings about email usage. Our broadband account faced the risk of closure.
The game was up. My precious 2-letter email address was unusable - any valid emails were being completely lost amongst all the infected ones, my inbox was too full to receive new emails, and even many of the valid ones that did get through were accusations of me sending them a worm (remember those spoofed headers?) I had little choice but to ask BT Customer Service to blackhole dv@btinternet.com to save our account, to protect their email service, and to prevent creating a storm of unexpected bounced emails to the poor souls whose addresses had been randomly chosen as the spoofed “from” address.
24 years later, and my dad’s BT Internet account is still around. Out of curiosity, I tried to log in and see if I could find the current state of dv@btinternet.com - but that functionality was removed some years ago, and it’s not possible to create new inboxes anymore. I tried sending an email to it - and got a regular “User unknown” reply back, indicating that at some point the blackhole was removed, and the account simply became non-existent.
I’d be curious to know if it is still receiving any email worms all these years later.