Wired is reporting that according to Google the total amount of email spam is going down.  (Thanks to Metroknow for the tip) .

This should be great news for many but it doesn’t really jive with my personal experience. My Google gmail spam box now gets on the order of a spam email every *minute*, 24/7 -(I need to check but I think I’m in the neighborhood of a thousand per day or close to it).   I get another several hundred per day that pass the filter, though I thin, this is partly the challenge of having some old email addresses that I don’t want to close down.   Generally, the older the address the more spam lists it winds up on.   I’m even having some issues at my Godaddy server with SMTP relays of the swirl of daily spam messages.

Update thought inspired by FG’s comment below:

I is possible that filtering has reached a point of diminishing return because at the level of tens of millions of emails the cost to send them is no longer trivial.

I’m guessing at these numbers: Let’s assume Google and other filters can kill off 9990 out of 10000 spams initially sent, and users then ignore 9 out of the remaining 10. Thus the spammer must send 10,000 to get one read. If the action on that one is 1 in 100 then it is going to take 100 x 10,000 = a million spam notes to get a single sale. At that level the bandwidth and time are no longer trivial costs, though they are still small.