Ah, yes. Spam

I get dozens of e-mails every day from people I don't know (and really have no wish to know). They have names like Krishna Gillis, Abbot Gore, Dulcinda Lala, Chaim Haleluya, Hugibert Fulawa, Aguinaldo Germaine, Beulah Bottleby, Ferril Darnworth, Marcellus Stanton, Traci Winemonger, Roxanne Murieta. Some names are more imaginative than others, but the more outrageous ones cannot be reproduced here, for reasons of propriety.

What these individuals (if indeed that's what they are) are contacting me about covers a whole spectrum of products and services, many having to do with pharmaceutical items intended to enhance performance or correct specific dysfunctions. But there are others that try to sell computer software, fake Rolex watches, college degrees, or offer debt relief in these trying times. These e-mail messages are known as 'spam', which is the brand name for a kind of luncheon meat I recall eating around the time that World War II ended. It's still around, but you have to be careful, as the fat and salt content in Spam is way up there.

Getting thirty to forty spam messages in one day is not unusual, but here I may have myself to blame, as I use more than one e-mail account. My e-mail server has a spam guard that filters out what it suspects to be spam, and that's good. What's not good is that sometimes the filter doesn't only weed out spam; it may also throw good, legitimate e-mail messages into the Spam folder, and if I'm not careful, these may be trashed forever without having ever been read. Has happened, to my chagrin and that of friends.

So now I don't automatically empty the Spam folder, sight unseen. Instead I examine the senders' names carefully to make sure that among the phony e-mails there isn't one that I really should open and read.