A few days ago a friend replied back to me that the e-mail I had sent her somehow got caught in her spam filter, and had she spotted it while periodically reviewing her spam filter.

It made me wonder how many important e-mails I've missed due to ignoring my spam filter?

I hardly ever review it because there's just hundreds of spams that get sent to me each day, it's around 500, give or take a hundred. Reviewing the spam filter for potentially good e-mails, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack that you don't know is actually there.

That's why I don't bother.

But today, I decided to take a careful review of my spam filter, but only for the stuff that got caught today. And I ended up finding three "good" e-mails...

* One was from an affiliate network telling me about a new affiliate merchant. I consider that a good e-mail because I had requested them to notify me of this.

* Second was a person telling me her e-mail address had changed, and she wanted her new one to display on my cemetery records site.

* Third, was a beef jerky retailer who wanted to buy some advertising on my beef jerky review blog.

That third one made me shake my head in disgust, to think that if I had not decided to review my spam filter today, I'd never have the opportunity to make that money.

Albeit, I get many e-mails from people asking about buying ad space on one of my sites, but most of the time they are actually affiliate networks who simply want me to join their network. But this guy sounds like a real deal.

So, should I spend each day combing my spam filter for stuff that shouldn't belong? If I do that, then I suppose I should ask why even bother having a spam filter.

Right now, my spam filter is set to "medium". Maybe I'll try adjusting it down to "low" and see what happens.