Drop Bigfoot, drop spam
Sep 18, 2003
I dumped my bigfoot account a last week and cut my spam down by 95% from upwards of fifty junk messages per day to less than five. When Bigfoot originally came out with the ‘bigfoot for life’ scheme I began using their email forwarding service and figured it would be a throw away account that would disappear after a few months. There was a limited feature set but it pretty much worked and you didn’t have to pay in exchange for occasionally receiving advertisements from their sponsors. Seemed okay and I gave it out to people and had the account on a pgp key. It went on for a while like this but, I speculate, the sponsor idea didn’t pan out and so they started sending advertisements for their value added features. Except, a lot of people like me didn’t think it was particularly valuable and didn’t sign up for the pricey features. When the dot-com spigot ran dry, so did the free lunch and they curtailed the most of the free services but left the basic forwarding and spam filtering. No big deal and I more or less forgot about them. I had long before routed email through other accounts and established a pobox.com account (which, by the way, is a service very much worth paying for and founded by some very nice people). Then Bigfoot lowered the number of messages that could go through per day. Still no big deal, I had very little going through them. Then they stopped spam filtering. I have to wonder if they didn’t encourage it, perhaps publish my address or maybe lift the per day message limit for these junk messages because my address was not all that widely used and I began receiving increasing amounts of crap. It went on for months. I had even forwarded the bigfoot account through pobox because the filtering was better. I regularly check headers and realized that nearly all the crap- with one exception, an account I used on CPAN- came through this one account. Not any more.