Tracts of spam
There's been some discussion on one of them mailing lists lately about quantities of spam, so I decided to count. I usually delete spam as it comes in over the course of the day, but for the past 24 hours I've been letting it accumulate in my spam folder. I appear to have received approximately 120 pieces of spam during the past 24 hours, about 20-30 of which arrived overnight (between the time I went to bed and the time I got up). That's more than I thought—averaging about 5 an hour. I think it seems like an unusual amount overnight because almost nobody else is sending me mail during that period, so there's a big set of spam messages with almost no real mail mixed in.