Spam Watching

Since I've had my default email address going on 10 years now, it stands to reason that I receive a lot of spam. I was thrilled when spam filters became standard practice on web based email clients like yahoo, hotmail, and now gmail.

In the past I've rather compulsively emptied my spam folder. It was usually several times per day. Even if there were only 3 or 4 spam messages in it at the time, I would click the empty button. At the end of each purging, a message would appear informing me that the system would automatically empty the folder for me, after a certain amount of time. However, my obsessive compulsive nature never really allowed me to simply let the system automatically empty itself.

That is, until the other day. I reached a turning point. My brain suddenly wondered just how much spam I could accumulate if I just let it gather. So, I decided to wait and watch. My compulsion has turned a corner. So, instead of compulsively emptying the folder, I'm compulsively checking how big it's gotten. I've left it for a couple of weeks now. I set it to automatically empty every two weeks.

Words cannot express how grateful I am that spam does not count against my storage space. To date, I have 1898 messages in my spam folder. This doesn't even include the few that manage to trickle through into my inbox every couple of days. Maybe, after a while I'll switch it to emptying every month, and see how big it'll get then!