SPAM IS MAIL TOO!

What's all this nonsense about the dangers of SPAM Mail? Some of us like our SPAM, thank you very much. Spam stand for Special Pain-in-the-Ass Mail and can be found in its own special folder in our e-mail. Some computers call this folder Bulk Mail, others Junk Mail, but it's best known as SPAM. Like regular junk mail that come to our mailboxes, it is filled with all sorts of unsolicited nonsense that we we can either throw away or open and read or simply toss in the shredder. In computers the shredder is the delete button, which tells you theses e-mails will be lost forever, unlike in your regular e-mail inbox, where deleting them sends them to your TRASH folder, where they sit until you feel like emptying that bin too.

It is widely reported that some SPAM is designed to rob your identity, and by simply opening the e-mail you let your electronic guard down for thieves to retrieve your personal information which is then used to empty your bank accounts, obtain lines of credit, loans and to purchase expensive items in your name and for which you will be liable. But that is the rare SPAM mail, so opening junk mail becomes an exciting game of chance as well as an opportunity to read advertisements for products ranging from practically free life insurance to hi-tech spot removers. Kind of like the Russian roulette of e-communications.

I for one would welcome an identity thief to steal my identity. If he or she could obtain substantial loans, buy expensive items and even purchase a new home in my name, well, they're better than me since I've been trying to do those same tricks with my own personal profile of electronic IDs without much luck at all. Maybe I've been going about it all wrong. Maybe if I steal my own identity then presumably the financial world will open up its vaults and credit lines to me. Since I open a lot of strange SPAM e-mail, perhaps some enterprising hacker out there is earnestly doing what I have failed to do over and over, to make me appear like a solid citizen worthy of unlimited credit and a sound investment for mortgage lenders.

One can only hope. I'd like to meet some of these diabolically clever hackers and glean some trade secrets. In today's world, though, nobody seems to ever meet anybody in person, so bulking up your electronic profile seems to be the way to go to gain prosperity. The loans, the mortgage and the meager credit that I have been able to secure in recent years have required me to meet exactly no one in person, with the occasional phone conversation wondering where last month's payment is being the only human interaction involved. Those phone calls are a welcome respite from anonymous electronic communication and an opportunity to meet people from India, many time zones away and in a pretty exotic place, too. I like to ask all sorts of cultural questions during these exchanges and have had some fruitful conversations.

At least fruitful on my end of the phone, since I get to learn a bit about life in India while on their end they rarely achieve the prompt payment they sought when they placed the call. I do like to think, however, that I made it worth their while anyway by teaching them some colorful American expressions and good old Brooklyn wisdom that can only help them in their job of dealing with payment-challenged Americans. The only disappointment is that the collectors from India all seem to have names like Freddy and Wendy and George, a surprising thing to me when my own Indian-American doctor here in Brooklyn is named Sanjay. You'd thing he'd be the one named George, no?

At any rate, who decides which mail is SPAM and which goes to the Inbox? My regular Inbox seems to attract just as much, if not more junk mail than my SPAM box, and I'm beginning to suspect that laws and regulations have been passed to limit the amount of SPAM on the internet. Where were all these legislators and regulators when the fat, aging and greedy preppies were breaking laws and shredding ethics rules while they almost destroyed our financial industries? That would have been a good area upon which to concentrate their righteous vigilance.

Instead, we're reduced to opening e-mails from the fictitious directors of the banks of China or Estonia telling us we've won millions of dollars or Euros in some internet lottery, just to dream of solvency, even if we know what a scam it is. And the regulators want to take that away too, our daydeams? This is not like physical junk mail that chops down entire forests to sell us abdomen exercise machines and miracle hair growth products, but resource-neutral electronic signals on an internet with infinite room for more and more information. The coaxial cables that carry the internet data are capable of handling many more times the information currently available. Beside, without SPAM, how would we keep up with all the psycho fringe groups advocating the immediate extermination of P.O.D.O., short for People Of Different Opinions. There's solid entertainment value there!

Or how about those groups who would have us worrying about people's cast-off pets in a world where 36,000 cast-off people die every single day from starvation? 36,000 cats and dogs sure don't die everyday from hunger! And a lot of World Hunger information comes to us as SPAM, and the ensuing Google searches some of these e-mails inspire can be valuable learning experiences. Lots of other SPAM mail sends us to search engines for more information, and if some of the information is frivolous, think of it like a parent encouraging their children to read: maybe the kids are reading silly comic books, but at least they're reading!

And think abut China, a nation that censors the internet. There's a ton of software engineers in China and no shortage of hackers. If anyone can get around official censorship, it's hackers, and who knows, maybe SPAM will one day set China free? The Chinese are a curious and industrious people, and what better way to pique their interest than SPAM mail from the SPCA babbling on about dogs, an integral part of the South Asian diet? The concept of their food as our pets ought to open up whole worlds of amusing dialogue and lead the Chinese to exploring the entire internet in spite of their government's attempts to shield them from some truly awful SPAM. SPAM leads to everything else out there in ether land, so who knows where their curiosity will take them? Perhaps to a new form of government. And just maybe the rest of the world can get a piece of the industrial action currently monopolized by the Chinese while they're distracted reading e-mails discussing better ways to wok their dogs. You never know. Long live SPAM!