Spam Spam

Anneliese Fox
3 min readJan 19, 2022

If you can’t tell if it’s fake, should you ignore it?

screenshot of junk email offering rewards for doing a survey
screenshot by author, not the spammiest, but not the most obnoxious either

No one wants to get an email detailing their love life, claiming that their computer and email has been hacked, and asking for money to fix the problem.

What do you do when you get several on the same day? From different senders, wanting money sent to different blockchain accounts?

I mean, really, how many Trojans can there be on my computer at one time, and, does it matter in which order I clear them up? Should I do them in the order in which the emails announcing the problem arrived, or reverse order? Can one hacker clean up all the problems, or do I need to engage all of them?

Honestly, it’s just too complicated for me to process. So whenever I see one of these lovlies in my inbox. I send it to the junk mail folder. (Command-shift-J on the Mac keyboard… faster than mousing.)

Thus far, none of my relatives, customers or coworkers have told me they received videos detailing my online adventures. I’m not sure what they’d make of the hours I spend on Medium or Googling things like how dehumidifiers work. To be honest, I have more followers on Medium than all of the above, so I guess I should be asking you: What do you think? Are my keystrokes offensive? Should I pay the money and give you peace?

Well, yes, I am pretty sure these emails are fake. As are 99% of the rest of the emails I receive in a day. As a developer and business person, I have several email addresses and I get the same emails asking me to buy woodworking plans, windows, knives, Asian, Russian and other brides, enhancements to organs I don’t have, drones, drugs, silly rugs, gadgets, directory listings and more.

I get the same emails every day, often several times a day, to each email address. The only thing that changes is the sender’s email address, which is always different. That’s because good spammers don’t send their own email. They hijack someone else’s system to do their dirty work.

I spend half an hour a day sending the several hundred emails that don’t get filtered by my junk filters to the junk mail system. It’s ungratifying and wasteful.

It’s stuff like this that makes me want to have a tax on email sent. I know what you’re thinking, and it would be awful to implement, but…

Anneliese Fox

Writer of speculative fiction, programmer, artist in wood and clay, owner of Fox Computer Systems. My almost weekly blog follows what interests me at the moment