Flaming Nora: Uncovering secrets in Spam
This week in her regular weekly column, Flaming Nora spies on some spam.
I used to have a healthy respect for my email spam filter. I worked away on my email, safe in the knowledge that the spam filter was filtering the spam and saving me from reading anything I’d much rather not. Yes, I assumed my spam filter was working correctly, and we all know what happens when you assume. My spam filter has indeed been making an ass out of me, and for some time too, it appears.
I first realised there was a problem after I’d signed up with eBay. The confirmation emails from eBay didn’t come through although eBay insisted they’d sent them. I went back to eBay and punched them through again but still they didn’t come, or so I thought. My over-zealous spam filter had taken the emails and stored them in the spam folder. I retrieved them, told the filter they weren’t spam and they were automatically moved to my inbox. Well, it was eBay and perhaps it happened to everyone, I thought. Then I thought again. If official emails from eBay had been going directly to spam, what else was had it taken when it shouldn’t? And that’s when I decided to prise open its clammy little hands and take a look.
My eyeballs scanned the titles of the first page of over 5,000 spams, registering quickly that most of them were rubbish. But wait, what was that? The title of one email was a project I’d been working on. There was a message from my boyfriend and more from other people that I most definitely wanted to be in touch with. I clicked them all open, horrified to find messages I should have received and read weeks ago. All that time they’d been sitting in the spam. But there was worse to come, there were more, many more. The vicious, spiteful spam filter had robbed me of my chance to read and respond to emails I’d requested, wanted and had been waiting for. Some of them were replies to emails I’d sent. Ooh, I was angry.
I couldn’t face scrolling through the haystack of spam but I plucked out and rescued as many emails as I could before I went cross-eyed with the effort then deleted the spam and emptied the folder. Starting from scratch with an empty spam folder, I now check it daily to ensure it doesn’t lure genuine emails to its lair, but sadly it still does. And there’s no way I can find to turn off the spam filter or ask it to relax, take it easy and chill. All I can do is retrain it to accept that some of the spam is genuine stuff and move it to my inbox to read. But for every dozen spams offering me a larger penis, Viagra or the balance of a Nigerian oil worker’s bank account, it also takes at least one genuine message which I have to retrieve.
The worrying thing is, I’m starting to enjoy it, this rummaging around in the depths of bad spam. Next time we meet I might just be able to let you know how it feels to satisfy my woman all night long while wearing a new Rolex, safe in the knowledge that I’ve got a clean septic tank. And a really big penis, of course. [Flaming Nora]
Flaming Nora is editor of Corrieblog
