Spamgourmet statistics

I’ve been using Spamgourmet for several years, and I just now thought I’d check and see who’s been attempting to spam me the most.

1. bigfoot.com, with 7712 messages since April 2006. I signed up for this service when I was in middle school, with their promise of a ‘lifetime forwarding e-mail address’ that would ‘never expire’. Unfortunately the web bubble burst and they apparently changed hands, some years later adding the caveat that they would use your precious address to spam you for the entirety of that lifetime. I gave everyone I knew new addresses to use, but I still held onto the bigfoot.com one, just in case there was someone who still had my old address and really wanted to send me the most important e-mail of my life. But finally I couldn’t take it any more, and I either was unable to satisfiably cancel my account, or simply didn’t trust them to stop spamming me if I did - so I assigned a somewhat profanity-laden address at spamgourmet.com to forward to. I see they’ve been making good use of it.
2. phpclasses.org, with 1214 messages since August 2004. I guess I’ve used them once or twice for minor code snippets. I seem to recall they looked sketchy.
3. macupdate.com, with 998 messages since July 2006. I signed up for a free trial, not realising that it was only a trial and that they were going to ask me to pay for it thereafter. Looks like they’re still asking.
4. Free iPod Pyramid Scheme, with 422 messages since July 2004. Hey, don’t give me that look, I bet you tried this too back when it was all the rage. I’m actually surprised there wasn’t more spam than this, since they actually admitted up-front that that was what they were going to do.
5. versiontracker.com, with 364 messages since September 2006. Probably about the same story as macupdate. Rather embarrassing that I apparently fell for the same thing twice, but thanks to spamgourmet, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

Runners-up, with between 50 and 100 messages: Bausche & Lomb (from a ReNu product recall form I filled out, apparently), Lineage (MMORPG that had a free trial I think), AOL Instant Messenger (various accounts), and Stuffit Expander (Mac archive utility that used to not suck, oh, maybe 10 years ago, and now they require an e-mail address just to download it).

Disclaimer: as Spamgourmet has deleted these messages before I saw them, there’s no way to know whether it was actually spam or not, and for all I know they might have had valid ‘unsubscribe’ links. But as I never indicated to these companies that I wanted to receive e-mail from them, and specifically indicated (where possible) that I did not, it’s as good as spam as far as I’m concerned.