Time Line

October 2018: The domains alychidesigns.com and qq.com are added to our in-house black list after a torrent of spam via our contact script pours into our inbox this year. All emails from those addresses are rejected.
March 2016: Our web site contact email address is compromised, forcing us to change it near the end of the month.
March 2014: Old email provider dropped. Nearly all of the spam we receive is via compromised addresses through this provider so spam rates drop to nearly zero.
December 2008: Arrests of a number of high-profile spammers have put a real dent in spam email being sent to our addresses in late 2008.
April 2008: Our ISP implements even more stringent spam filtering. All mail (except for certain authorised addresses) sent to our domains is automatically rejected. No further forgery attacks are reported after 10 April.
October 2007: Our ISP implements more stringent spam filtering.
December 2006: All mail sent to the "abuse" address in our domain is deleted unread at the ISP level from mid-month.
March 2006: A disc crash and change of email reader results in the loss of most of email at one of our academic addresses. No further spam from this account is reported.
August 2003: All mail sent to invalid addresses in our domain is deleted unread at the ISP level and is no longer included in the totals on the home page.
July 2003: Since spammers have stolen and rendered unusable our private email addresses, we are forced to get new addresses; hence the huge drop in spam numbers.
April 2003: Yet another of our academic accounts benefits from the introduction of SpamAssassin to the mail system. Combined with Procmail, virtually nothing gets through.
October 2002: One of our academic accounts benefits from the introduction of SpamAssassin to the mail system. Virtually nothing gets through.
September 2002: All mail sent to invalid addresses in our domain is filtered at the ISP level.
April 2002: We begin forwarding spam from certain bulk mailers back to them. We didn't sign up for their lists so they can have their messages back. Also, all mail sent to invalid addresses in our domain is filtered.
February 2002: We begin aggressive filtering at the ISP level on our personal accounts.
November 2001: We phase in filtering at the ISP level on our personal accounts.
September 2001: We institute local filtering on our personal accounts.
August 2001: JANET begins using the Realtime Blackhole List (now Trend Micro Email Reputation Services). One of our academic institutions uses it to add warnings to the email headers. Two others simply reject such tagged email.
July 2001: Spam is tracked and reported for our personal accounts.
March 2001: After much testing, we institute local filtering on two of our academic email accounts.
October 2000: We begin experimenting with local filters on our two academic accounts.
October 1998: Obliquity goes online. Spam is tracked and reported for two of our academic email accounts.