Everybody receives it. In the last few weeks my university account was functioning I received about 100 emails per day. Less than 1 of them (on average) was ‘valid’ email, the rest was spam. OK, I admit: In the 5 years I’ve used that account I did nothing to prevent spam (back in ’98 the amount of spam was not that high), but still: it shouldn’t be the case that spam completely ruins a communication channel…

It took a long time before I received my first spam on my new email account: I received the first spam email on 15th of March (almost a year after this domain was activated) on an address that I’ve never used (I create a separate email address for each company that I dead with, and I have a personal email address). 5 days later I started receiving spam regularly (about one per 2 days) on yet another email address that I haven’t used.

And on my new ISPs (XS4All) address I received my first spam mail before I was even noticed that the account was activated.

It’s now completely obvious to me that SMTP has to go, and that everyone should get a digital certificate.