For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to think of something clever to write about the spam email I receive. How it forms spontaneous, found poetry in my Trash folder, or how the From addresses are getting to be familiar like the names of long-forgotten friends.

But I am unable to say anything amusing or witty about this plague. I receive between 250 and 300 spams every 24 hours. My filters sometimes make mistakes, so I have to scroll through looking for real mail that’s been marked as spam. This is extremely irritating.

A few years ago, one of my Tech Know columns was on stopping spam (Kill Spam in Metropolis issue 376). It was a good article, but plenty of what I wrote no longer applies. Those [insert expletive here] [insert additional expletive for good measure] spammers know a million ways to trick the system. I thought I had a pretty good arsenal, but in reality I know no ways to defeat them.