By Staff
Leada DeVaney, Editor
It was just one Friday. One single Friday. Eight hours.
That's the amount of time I was out of the office recently. During that same amount of time, I received 198 emails. Out of that 198, about 10 were "real" emails, sent from people I actually know.
The rest were spam, the computer term for unsolicited emails, the computer equivalent of regular junk mail. In spite of having a "spam blocker" on our system here, we receive lots of junk email. We even compete to see who gets the most.
"I got 47 today," our sports editor said recently.
"I got 111," I replied, confident he couldn't top that number.
He didn't.
The funny thing about spam is, I doubt anyone actually reads it. It quickly gets deleted and then deleted out of the deleted folder. Out of sight, out of mind.
But, after the record-setting 198, I started paying a little more attention to what spam was coming in to my email. Apparently, these people don't know much about me.
I got lots of emails about refinancing my house or applying for a home equity line of credit. I got several more about different web site sales or updates on why I should send flowers for every occasion short of maybe Groundhog Day. There were also a lot of email claiming to be "the product I told you about." Most of those were from Barbara, Sue or John.
The problem with those, of course, is I don't know Barbara, Sue or John and I don't think I'm going to take their advice on what type of car I should drive.
And, somehow, I've ended up on just about every wedding-related spam list there is. It's as if Big Brother is watching out there and learned I'm getting married so therefore I must be interested in ordering matching bride and groom baseball hats.
I can ignore all those, however. But it's the personal improvement ones I'm starting to worry about. For some reason, I've received a lot of emails about diets, hairloss and improving my complexion.
I'm starting to take these type of spam emails personally. Maybe someone was sending these to me as a subtle hint. After all, they all seemed to be coming from the same place. Maybe these weren't spam but genuine emails meant to provide important information. What if this spam wasn't spam at all, but my guardian angel trying to tell me something?
And then, the next day, I opened an email from the same source. "Enlarge the size of your…"
Wait. I can't do that. It's not humanly possible. So all these personal improvement suggestions were just spam after all.
Delete.