Looking through my e-mail, I notice one or two things. A lot of it is from people I don’t know trying to sell me things I don’t want. If I were half as clever as Kevin Guilfoile, I might try turning this e-mail into poetry, but I am not. I also notice that most viruses are so obviously viruses that I almost never need Norton to tell me I should delete something. “Oh wow! Something called ‘Mind Aerobics’ from someone I don’t know and it’s nothing but an .scr attachement?! How could this be anything but good?!” Messages like this are so transparently stupid, that it’s amazing anyone gets computer viruses via e-mail. Not that everyone who gets a computer virus is stupid, of course, but, geez. An executable file from someone you’ve never heard of with really bad grammar ought to set off some kind of alarm, don’t you think?
Lately, I’ve been trying out MailWasher, which allows you the opportunity to bounce messages directly back to the spammer, with the idea that they’ll assume your address doesn’t work and eventually remove you from their list. It doesn’t always work — I’ve had to manually unsubscribe from all the About.com mailing lists someone thought it would be fun to sign me up for — but if nothing else it makes the process of deleting spam much quicker and keeps mail like “Free XXX Webcams” out of my In Box.
But I think what I notice most about my e-mail is that I don’t get enough from people I want to hear from. That just doesn’t seem right.