Spam artist

I had been getting too much Spam. No, not the kind that Pinoys like to serve as turkey on Thanksgiving; the kind that comes in your e-mail inbox every day.

Spam, as such, doesn’t bother me too much. As a Mac user, I’ve found that I receive less Spam and fewer downloaded viruses than PC users (or so I’ve convinced myself). But my Spam was starting to get very repetitive, usually of the Burkina Faso variety, informing me that some rich dictator had passed away and was anxious to send his scuttled millions to an offshore savings account — mine — if I would just send him the account number and details.

So, plowing through the daily Spam to find the pertinent daily mail got to be a chore.

That’s when I realized I had SpamGuard.

My Yahoo Mail account provides a clever little feature which bounces incoming Spam into some rarely-looked-at inbox. It’s like a little dose of Spam-Off, flicking away bugs and boogers and come-ons for penile enhancements. So I clicked it on and noticed an immediate drop in my daily inbox arrivals. This was good. I was now getting the stuff I needed, like daily links to the New York Times, messages from jobstreet.com and unsolicited Pokes from people.

The problems began about three weeks into my de-Spaminated status. People started texting me. Sometimes urgently. Sometimes angrily. They wanted to know why I hadn’t responded to such and such invite, or run such and such article. (See, as a desk editor for The Philippine STAR, one of the things I must face in my inbox every single day is piles of articles to be edited and polished before being sent back to the Big Inbox of Cyberspace and laid out for our daily readers.) People seemed peeved. Pikon. “Why didn’t you run my article? What have I done to offend you? Where should I send the cash?” That sort of thing.

Well, in reality, what was happening was that I had overzealous Spam protection. This thing was a monster. It was the Terminator of Spam. It was even bouncing e-mail from our section editor, Millet Mananquil, straight into Spam Land. It was sending unedited submissions straight into the netherworld of unread mail, a place I look at as frequently as I check the undersides of garden rocks. My SpamGuard had become like a steely-eyed sniper at the Battle of the Bulge, picking off any advancing Axis soldiers. It couldn’t tell good mail from bad; it regarded every little note with grave suspicion. Its policy was, Spam first, ask questions later.

The worst part of it was when I tried sending something to my own e-mail address (I do this habitually, as a backup, because I don’t trust flash drives 100 percent). It never arrived. The Spam Sniper had picked it off at Antwerp. It was lying, twitching and bleeding, in my Spam box.

I was surprised when I visited my Spam inbox and spied a vast treasure trove of unread mail: letters from my family, offers to visit foreign countries, and yes, even urgent pleas to claim hundreds of millions of dollars from Burkina Faso. (I had actually missed those.)

I was in a bit of a pickle. To SpamGuard, or not to SpamGuard? Sure, it was wonderful not to wade through tons of unwanted mail (offers to buy, or sell, gold; come-ons for “uncensored Internet TV”; even a form to order my very own “Historic Barack Obama Dollar Coin” — hey, guys, the election’s over!). But when I began to realize that SpamGuard could have a mind of its own, and it may be as persnickety as the Church Lady over what does and does not constitute “Spam,” that’s when I had second thoughts. To switch analogies a little, my SpamGuard had become like HAL in 2001, the supercomputer that flatly declares what is and isn’t advisable for the surviving astronauts on the Jupiter mission (“I really think you should take a stress pill and think this over, Dave…”).

So I decided to pull the plug. I found out there are no gradations to Spam control; it’s either on or off. I chose “off.” At least I can still — carefully and individually — consign certain messages to Spam Hell (there’s still a “Spam” button above my messages for this). But now I do it on a case-by-case basis.

Sure, now I have to wade through 20-30 extra messages each morning — offers to buy wine by the crate, cures for snoring, forms to order business cards, enticements to buy land in Brazil, even an offer for “3 Nights in Cancun!” — but I tell myself it’s one of those things we Netizens have to endure for a free and democratic e-mailing system.

Still, it’s puzzling that no one has yet claimed all that money from Burkina Faso.