1M+ Spam Emails Per Month!

Whoa!! I just got a rather surprising (to me) warning from Gmail. It reads:

You are almost out of space for your Gmail account. You can view our tips on reducing your email storage or purchase additional storage.

As I said, this was a bit of a surprise to me. When I first began using Gmail, I kept a close eye on my storage usage, but it used to climb so slowly that I soon forgot all about it. But upon seeing the above message, I quickly glanced down to read:

You are currently using 6989 MB (95%) of your 7356 MB.

Now of course, there's no way I'm using 7GB for email... I'm just not that busy!! ;)

So a glance to the left this time, and sure enough, there's been an explosion of spam of late... indeed, I now have 1,034,188 spam messages.

Admittedly, I haven't cleaned them out for well over two years. Gmail automatically deletes all spam messages more than 30 days old, so at some point (I thought) spam would reach a rough equilibrium, with new spam messages roughly equaling spam messages being automatically deleted. And indeed, this has been the case for quite some time... I have often glanced across and observed that my received spam increases just very slightly month to month, but nothing like this.

To look at it another way, according to Gmail I have received more than one million spam messages in the past 30 days!!! Now surely that has to be some kind of record!! :|

I just did a quick random sample, and it seems that all of these spam messages were indeed addressed to me (I have a number of different addresses that all go to my Gmail account)... so it's not just Gmail playing up :(

Ah well, time to hit that "Delete all spam messages now" link... I wonder how long it will take... probably a fraction of a second?