SPAM

And I don't mean the type in a can... although I am somewhat partial to that treat, especially when camping. That, and canned corned beef - not corned beef hash which looks like dog food. But, I digress.

SPAM by any other name is usually called junk mail, be it electronic or snail delivery.

Sometimes spam is fun... as I will show you later on in this post.

BUT, first, my issues.

I just received an email that promised to lower my weight by three dress sizes. In fairness, my email address of "lore" does leave some ambiguity to my true sex, but if it was me, I'd lean more toward a male name versus it being a female name. Needless to say, my wife would have a raised eyebrow if I were to go down three dress sizes since that would demand a whole new wardrobe for me.

Before going too much further, I should admit I have more than one email address. I have several. Some are used strictly for junk email where I've gone to pages that are giving something away but demand your email address to sign up for their "discreet or seldom used" emails.  By stating "discreet" I was not inferring to any porn site - I meant, they promise not to bombard me with a bazillion emails.  Yeah, right.

I have an email with "bob" as the contact.  Now, just offhandedly, I would think most people would consider that name to be a male. Although, it could be a shortened "bobbie" for a girl, but...

Anyway, as "bob" I was offered an exclusive opportunity to join other young female executives into a very prestigious organization. I've received this email repeatedly over the days, weeks, months and yes, even years. Finally, in desperation, I replied. I was formal. I was polite. I was to the point. I wanted to know, since I'd been especially selected by a committee to join this elite group, exactly how my membership in said organization would appear, being that I'm a retired, non-executive male. Would this be an honorary degree or title? Would I be allowed to speak at engagements as "one of the girls" when they had said meetings. Of course, the fact I am over 70, male, and retired, I wasn't exactly sure how I would interact as a forceful, young female executive on her way up the corporate ladder. I was sure my insight to hair style, tasteful clothing, proper makeup and office mindset would or could be somewhat skewed.

Since my offer to accept the application and join the organization, I received ONE direct email stating the offer was designed to be general and my name would be removed from the mailing list. Since then I can honestly state, offers to join those esteemed females of the business world has lessened.

Several of my email addresses have received offerings to enhance my sexual experience. Some seem to have an idea that I might be a male and need either sexual enhancements, either in actual physical dimensions or heightened sexual enjoyment. They get deleted.  Still, I did get a couple that thought I might be female and needed a way to expand my sexual knowledge and/or heighten the pivotal moment's experience by making it last longer. I'm still on the fence as to whether I want to reply to that particular email. I really worry it might be a "snagger" - somebody who spams and hopes for replies to validate a "real" email address.

About "snaggers" - almost every email has at the bottom a little quip to state if you no longer wish to receive these emails, click here and you'll be removed or unsubscribed from the list. Again, YEAH. RIGHT. So many of those emails are valid email address collectors. Valid email addresses - you reply, validates your email as real - are worth their weight in gold... and I mean it. Even a digital email address does have some weight and become a great weapon or sales point.  You can sell 1000 emails for $1.00 but you can sell 100 validated emails for $100 - of course, I'm making up the values since I don't know the truth in what email addresses are worth, but I do know valid ones are very valuable. And, yes, one can buy email lists, and the validated email lists are extremely expensive.

I, at first, was clicking on those links to remove myself from that particular spam list. All it seemed to do was increase my junk email.  Years ago, before I had "wifi" on the road, I was camping for a week (5 days - Monday thru Friday) and when I got home, you should have seen my email "in" box.  BTW, I did have a limited spam filter working back then, too.  I will be honest - I had 3 email accounts at that time.  My "lore" address - which is my main account - had over 2700 emails in 5 days. The other two accounts had over 4000 emails between them. I spent a whole day deleting junk.  I was reminded of the scene from "Bruce Almighty" where Jim Carrey decides to just reply "yes" to all the prayer requests. I was considering just highlighting all the mail and hitting 'delete' but that meant I may lose some real mail. I stepped back from that idea and continued to delete each junk email, saving the good emails to read later.

As you read above with the executive women junk email, I had a little fun and I could have had a lot more.  Here's a couple of links to some great spam email interaction.  Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ  (African gold transfer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Uc-cztsJo  (Mandela diamond deal)

and this one shows how to handle "unsubscribe" tactics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dceyy0cX6J4

For me, I have and own several domains and therefore can have as many email addresses as I want. Of course, I also have other email addresses, too. Maintaining them does get a tad overwhelming, but they serve their purpose for me. The one "junk" email address I have is the easiest one to maintain. I go in, peruse who the email is from, select all, and hit delete. This process takes maybe a whole minute, maybe two minutes. As I said, it is my junk account and I don't usually want anything to do with the emails that come to it. My other email addresses take a little longer to work through the spam but...

As I munch on my Spam sandwich, I happily delete the spam from my main and other accounts.

Until next I ramble on...