......it's time once again for our not-so-regular look at the spam that ends up in our email buckets. Mr. Spammer has been writing to me regularly for the last week or so about all the lovely retail outlets (online and brick-and-mortar) that I visit.

---

Dear Mr. Spammer,

I am so sorry for the delay in replying to all of your wonderful correspondance that you have been sending lately. I've found myself up to my eyeballs in something called "work" and it's prevented me from being as prompt as I normally am with my email. Friends who are closer to me than you are can attest to that fact, but I respect them too much to give you their email addresses. I suspect that you already have their addresses though.

You have been sending some really lovely emails lately about being a customer of Amazon and Starbucks, and relentlessly sending me email about a lovely gift card that I could get from both of those organizations if I just submit a survey about them. You recently sent one from Circuit City, and I know you didn't mean to do that as I haven't shopped there in years, and in no way would I ever give *them* my email address.

Even still, I love that there's this continuing insistence that I need to take these surveys to get my gift cards. Honestly, Mr. Spammer, they're gift cards. That means that they're gifts, right? No strings. So you should be giving me those cards instead of making me click links that I think are highly suspicious because they don't root on the company's own servers but somewhere else. Probably a marketing firm or a spammer that just wants to suck the life out of my email box. That's ok, I don't get to read that much spam anymore anyway because my main email address doesn't let it deliver to the inbox anymore.

But that won't stop my correspondance with you because I get spam on another of my dozen email addresses and I get it by the bucketload daily. And just email me the gift codes that I can use on the various websites to get my credits. Oh, you need my mailing address to send the cards? Hrm. No, I'd rather stick to emailing with you Mr. Spammer - I wouldn't want your valuable correspondance to get lost among all those credit card offers that I get in my physical mailbox every day.

Thank you muchly and I'll talk to you next time.
~WG~ *Hums the melody from Robert Lamm's 'Gimme Gimme' as she walks away*