Gris's Journal

Spam and cheese

As a matter of course, I check my email-- work and personal-- several times a day. Despite having my own, personal email mailbox (several of them, actually), I find that, as with the family snailmail mailbox, very little of what I receive is actually for me. Yes, boys and girls, I'm talking about that all-too-familiar blight of our digital age, SPAM. (No offense to Hormel-- although I'm certain their form could clog up your email pretty badly, too....)

So, alright... spam in itself is an irritation, a time-waster, a disease, etc., etc., etc.... I could go on in this vein for quite some time, but why? You know this part already. After all, this is an online blog, and chances are good that if you're reading blogs you have a computer and an email account of your very own and already have intimate knowledge of the marvels and horrors of spam. I, however, am proud (?) to announce that I have come up with new and different reasons to be frustrated with my spam.

You see, my problem with my spam is that it's not *my* spam. Alright, back up, a few words of explanation about my own personal neuroses. As the youngest child of three, there was a lot of sharing between siblings, and many things of mine that had once been my sisters' and had been passed on to me. My big sisters were *much* bigger than me, and capable of far more noteworthy accomplishments than I was. (Mind you, I'm not saying my parents ignored me... far from it. And my grandmother spoiled me rotten. But when there're five people in your family and you're by far the littlest, you look for ways to "catch up" with the big people however you can.) Mail, then, held special promise... not only was it something that was brand-new of my very own, but it also meant someone had found *me* important enough to rate the time and effort of a letter or card. Even now, I'm particularly touched when someone hand-writes me, because I know that there are so many easier options available to them today.

So anyway, I had a love-hate relationship with the mailbox when I was younger. On the one hand, there was always that delicious possibility that someone had sent *me* my very own letter. (Not that I greatly improved the chances of this by writing to other people-- I was a terrible correspondent and still am-- but I lived in hope.) On the other hand, there was cold, lackluster experience telling me that most of the mail would be grown-up business-related stuff, and that most of the people I knew either lived too close to bother sending me mail, or lived far enough out on the fringes of my tiny social existence to make it unlikely I'd get mail except on my birthday, if then. Casual contact with relatives and friends was made by phone; there really wasn't any reason to send me mail except on special occasions.

That changed slightly when I was old enough to order things in my own name and pay for them with my own money (or with the credit card company's money). Then, at least, I started getting junk mail with my name on it. It's probably a sign of how pitifully I craved mail that I would get mad at my parents for throwing out my junk mail with the rest of the it. (It was *my* junk mail, dammit, at least let me look at it and chuck it myself.) For the most part, though, the pattern stands through today: casual contact is made by phone, email, or chat. I get a small, near-daily dose of junk mail (my parents get more than I do, but hey, I live in their house, it's more their mailbox than mine), a little bit of business mail once a month (ditto), and the rare, occasional personal letter (which, I blush to say, is usually responded to with a phone call or some other form of contact. As much as I whine to myself about lack of mail or email, it's not like I'm *doing* anything about it, so I pretty much deserve what I get).

Alright, back to the virtual world, the one place that I have mailboxes I can truly call my very own, and a mailer daemon that might sometimes lose my mail or bounce it back to the sender, but who will never put it in the wrong person's box. Here, at least, I might have the reasonable expectation that all the mail I receive is *mine,* right? Even if my virtual mailbox is regularly stuffed to the gills with with spam, it's spam aimed in my general direction, right? (You're not expecting the answers to those questions to be "yes," right? After all, I wouldn't have a blog entry, then. ;) But to continue...)

Noooo, wrong, unh-unh... because spammers are *stoopid,* and because it's far easier to spam in bulk than to fire them off individually. So not only do most of the spammers seem to think I'm a sex-crazed, drug-happy male homeowner ("Bigger p.enis! Plese your lady tonite!" "Cheap Vico-din, Vi@gra!" "Lowest m0rtgage rates ever!" No, really, thanks, wrong on all counts), most of them aren't even *addressing* the spam to me. The subject line, and sometimes even the to: line, indicate some other person I've never heard of, or "continue" conversations I was never involved with. Granted, this makes it a heck of a lot easier to weed out, but perversely I'm a little hurt that I don't rate my own spam. (See above-mentioned neuroses. And no thanks, I really don't need helpful people to give my *proper* name and address to spammers to correct this oversight. I'm perverse, but not THAT perverse.)

And lest it seem like I'm whining over a small fraction of my daily mail, here... out of curiosity, I decided to save a day's worth of mail from my personal account rather than immediately deleting or moving the spam and any "handled" mail, as I usually do. So here it is, my mail for the day (boy, won't the search engines have a ball with this... maybe I'll spawn a few Googlewhacks). I collected from about 1 am yesterday to 1 am now, and have them listed in reverse chronological order. Senders deleted to protect the innocent, but what random explicitness I received remains intact. (You have been WARNED. Yes, I do get some very nasty adult spam. Anyone who might be offended by this, please stop reading now or skip down to the no doubt more entertaining comments.) My *legitimate* mail-- that is, the stuff I either wanted to receive or that came as a solicited advertisement-- is in bold (trust me, there's too much spam to do this the other way 'round):

hiAvp Sun 07/11 2k
Hello Jholden Sat 07/10 5k
deficit toothaches for 044 Mon 06/14 4k
deficit toothaches for 044 Mon 06/14 4k (two copies, two hours apart)
concurring fairfax Sun 06/13 3k
garbage can 79 impresarios Sun 06/13 2k
poetic armageddon Lisaj Sun 06/13 4k
Ever wanted some DARVON or VAL1UM ?? fire hydrant 470 toothpicks Sun 06/13 4k
Link advisable carpathia stonecrop piraeus Sat 06/12 5k
hiGlenda Fri 06/11 4k
cognac Fri 06/11 4k
Better Return, lower risk Fri 06/11 4k
hostage Fri 06/11 3k
betatron XNAX,DARVON,VAL1UM, LEV1TRA..S0MA..MUCH MORE......US PHARMACIES Fri 06/11 5k
crotch XNAX..S0MA-viag**ra-Phentermine-Ultram-Ambien - Diflucan . . Fri 06/11 4k
TIME to REFILL Your Prescription cargo bay bodice rippers defined by 6542 Thu 06/10 5k
Pheromone Spray for Men - As Seen On TV! Thu 06/10 4k
Urgent, Refill Your Prescription Now Lissa_30710 boor harry Thu 06/10 3k
chivalry Order prescriptions from the convenience of your home Thu 06/10 5k
[none] Thu 06/10 3k
Right Stuf Weekly Specials - 6/10! Thu 06/10 55k
Vwwymy s@ve m0ney 0n V~i_c_o`din, f.r.ee ship.ping Thu 06/10 2k
pontiff Thu 06/10 2k
Amazon.com DVDs as Low as $8.99 in Our Red-Hot Sale Thu 06/10 77k
Fwd: Re: Transcript Thu 06/10 2k
You deserve to find that special someone Thu 06/10 2k
Corel Word hzqjh Perfect Office 2002 Thu 06/10 3k
Re: Thu 06/10 4k
Right Stuf Special - Steal of a Deal Sale! Thu 06/10 7k
Re: Go to the head of the geek pile Thu 06/10 1k
Rolex Watch's Want One? 19 Thu 06/10 7k
Rolex Watch's Want One? 19 Thu 06/10 7k (duplicates)
Survey on Financial Products [59771] Thu 06/10 3k
Re: Hi Thu 06/10 2k
Yahoo! Reminder: WORK 9-5, 6/12/2004, 9:00 am Thu 06/10 5k
Ever Thought To Increase Thickness Of Ur Pen-i-s? No? sake north Thu 06/10 4k
Attractive Daily Savings: Rates hit all time low Lisl_1! Thu 06/10 2k
Incoming message Thu 06/10 2k
Be Selective, Pick From 3+Million Eligible Singles lisl_1 Thu 06/10 4k
The Little Blue-Pill: Is this your life lisl_1... Maybe you should do something about it. Thu 06/10 4k
[none] Wed 06/09 2k
Igacnbri your Rx informati0n is included. Wed 06/09 3k
Americas best kept Secret Wed 06/09 3k
Lisl_1, safetly enhance your p enis Wed 06/09 1k
Sexually Explicit: Christy creams her panties, check it out Wed 06/09 1k
Wanna save $$ on software? Wed 06/09 3k
www.ebay.com ! Wed 06/09 8k
Sexually Explicit: 24/7 hot & horny moms Wed 06/09 1k
loose AS EASY AS 123 TO PURCHASE SUPER L0W PRICE SOFTWARES FROM US exercise fort... Wed 06/09 5k
Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender Wed 06/09 5k (yes, this was spam)
financial problems ? We can help survivals Wed 06/09 3k
Internet special on Cialis - No prescription required Wed 06/09 2k

Total count: 53 pieces of email, 309K, out of which 7 pieces of mail (150K, as RightStuf's weekly newsletter is hefty) were solicited; of the remaining 46 pieces of spam, only 4 were even addressed to my username. Really makes a girl (got that, spammers? GIRL! No pe.nis!) feel loved, I tell ya.

Now pardon me while I go check my spam....

Posted by gris at June 11, 2004 01:24 AM