During my week-long sojourn in sickness there was this peek in the week when my temperature had a few too many integers added in. (I loose two points for ending a sentence with a preposition… would it kill me to come up with another throw away noun?) During this time of confusion, lethargy, and yes… pain, you’d think someone would have had the decency to put the poor creature down. No wait, strike that. The confusion part hasn’t quite worn off (yet). During this time (yada yada yada)… I didn’t check my email.

“For crying out loud, you mean to tell me all this carrying on is about email?”

Yes.

“Are we going to keep pretending this is a conversation with someone else?”

No.

“Don’t you love me anymore?”

Please, not now.

—

Every now and again there is a place for division. Everything below the above line is quite serious. To recap, that’s: above the line = not serious, below the line = serious. Please enjoy the rest of your reading experience. (The Staff)

Yes, email. Three days of previously unchecked email produced a little under 300 pieces of junk mail, as sorted by my trusty Mac. Ten pieces of email escaped my filter, and indeed were legit. Three days, approximately 300 pieces of email, and 97 percent of it was total crap (pardon my english). There’s nothing new here, junk email is as ubiquitous as that envelope of coupons I get from Val-Pak every week (or at least, that’s who it was the last time I paid it enough attention to read the envelope… sometime back in ’68 I think it was, right after my first tour in ‘Nam). No, what I was interested in was how my email strategy was working out. I have one address, through my ISP, that I use essentially as a throw away address. I protect it as much as I can, but when I need to provide an address to an organization or a company I’m doing business with – that’s the one I use. Then there’s my precious. My one address I get from my favorite computer company that no one gets but my friends and family. And last, there’s a dummy email address I set up with my ISP. I’ve never used it. I’ve never given it to anyone. I set up new computers in my house and I forget I have it. As expected, my throw away address brings in a lot of the junk. Also as expected, my precious generates very little junk mail (only 3 of the 300, in fact). No, the real corker is that my dummy address generates almost the same number of junk messages as the throw away address. I haven’t mentioned Cheryl’s address. She’s got a precious address from my favorite computer company too… that she treats like a cheap whore. Before we had THE (email) TALK, she gave that thing to anything with an IP address. We’re talkin all kinds of bad email mojo man. You know what? Even Cheryl’s address gets less junk (like one half) than my dummy address from my ISP, that as you may recall – I’ve NEVER USED.

It all boils down to this: it’s just one more reason you need to get a Mac… or not, so long as it’s not so many of you that you spoil my good thing I’ve got going on.