From bad to worse

Around the middle of last year, the level of spam I received rose from bad to truly ridiculous. Like everybody else, I reached a situation where the spam messages were massively outnumbering ordinary e-mail, and I started to think (as I still do) that the usefulness of e-mail as a tool was in decline. Not only is it easy to lose useful e-mail amongst the spam, but spam filters are becoming steadily more vicious, and useful e-mail is sometimes getting deleted even before it gets to you. (I have found that I am using instant messaging rather than e-mail more and more to contact friends and family members. I do not know of this is a consequence, but it may be. Certainly I have had the option of using instant messaging for well over a decade, but until now I have generally not used it). However, as I now know things could have been worse.

For now a lot of my e-mail is both spam and virus infected. Simultaneously.