This has been a really big week here at BreezeTree Software. Apparently, there are over 5000 new employees here. I know because everyday I get hundreds of emails for them.

I’m not too sure about mussolini@breezetree.com. It probably won’t be too long before the other employees start complaining about him. And ehemp@breezetree.com - what’s he, some sort of virtual stoner?

And what am I going to do with gofart@breezetree.com? “Hey Go Fart, why don’t you go, um, well, you know. Just go do it next to Mussolini.”
Seriously, though, this is beyond annoying. I just updated my SPF settings to be more restrictive. It continued to get worse anyway, so obviously many email servers don’t use the SPF service.

For those not familiar with it, SPF (Sender Policy Framework) allows you to specify what servers a legitimate email from your organization can come from. It’s remarkable easy for someone to spoof that they are sending emails from a different domain.
The worst thing is, my spam filter doesn’t segregate these emails. I had to do it manually. I created a temporary junk folder and put them all in there. It was a good thing, too. I found 5 legimate emails (2 from customers!) that I had dumped in there.

I would gladly pay $0.001 per email to help stem this tide. Plus, I would love to see legislation outlawing this tactic. Last week I read that 86.2% of all email is spam. What number do we have to hit before action is taken?