Email Alerts

Not counting work, I have three email accounts. One account is from way back in the almost-no-internet days. It languishes nearly neglected, except for my occasional visits to either delete the mountain of “special offers” building up, or when I revisit one of the very few very old, emails sent to me many years ago. 

(I just checked. The oldest email in there is from me to me, sent on August 5th, 2002. It concerns parents and their special needs student's legal rights in dealing with their schools. What a shock!)

The other two email accounts are accounts I use daily. One is my Gmail account. I guess this would be my primary account. The other email account is through my Internet Service Provider. I’ve had this ISP account longer than my Gmail account. In fact, I think I’ve had the ISP account even before there was a Gmail. 

There are a lot of things tied to this ISP account - things like my bank(s) contact information, my (seldom used) Ebay account, my (too often used) Amazon account- along with a bunch of other stuff I signed onto when this was the only email address I had (other than my, even back then, obsolete older email).

The thing about my ISP account is, I get an inordinate amount of junk mail at this account. Way, way more than what I get with my Gmail account. I’m not talking about “special offers” for things I have no interest in, I’m talking about the "we're-trying-to-scam-you" type of emails - stuff like the “Prince of Nigeria”-type emails (though admittedly, it’s been quite a while since I’ve heard from my friend, the Prince). Even my old, neglected email account doesn’t get the amount of spam I get with this account.

The email scams I get seem to run in spells - but when I get them, most of them fall into three main groups: 1) The "There is a Problem With Your Amazon Account and it is Now Locked Until You Provide Certain Confidential Information" group, 2) The "There is a Problem With Your Apple Account and it is Now Locked Until You Provide Certain Confidential Information" group, and the most popular group of all, 3) The "There is a Problem With Your Credit Card Account and it is Now Locked Until You Provide Certain Confidential Information" group. This one is so popular that sometimes I get emails from "banks" I don't even deal with.

Often, these emails go directly to my spam folder. But more often than not, they don’t. Usually, I don’t even bother to open these emails - I just hold my cursor over the sender’s name to see the email address of the sender - and it usually shows up as something like, “ix37txeitWxxAPy1111sai23@payme.com” or “ivanwantstoscrewyou@somewherein.ru” or whatever - senders which make it pretty obvious that the email was not, in fact, sent from the desk of the dedicated Account Manager at my friendly credit card company.

Sometimes though, I do open them. When I do, it’s never because I feel like, Oh my god! I better reply to this important email right away and confirm all of my personal account information before this obviously grave error goes on any longer, and while I'm at it, I better make sure they have my correct Social Security number - along with any other personal information I can think of.

No, if I open the email at all, it’s almost always because I want to see how “clever” the email is. How blatant are they in asking for information? How well written is the email? Are there any misspellings? Is their grammar even worse than mine? 

I got another one of these emails just the other day, on September 1st. Here it is:

I’ve since deleted the actual email so I can’t tell you whether it was sent from my friend Ivan or from the Prince, but whoever sent it, man, they need to up their game. 

Really? There’s a possible problem with a couple of transactions from back in ... January? And not only that, but apparently I need to “verify the following reason transaction(s)” (whatever that means), so I can "continue to use" my card - a card I’ve probably used close to a thousand times since January (sadly). 

Why is this important notice so late in getting to me? Come on, you guys! It’s the US Mail that’s being screwed over by getting slowed down (and sabotaged through what used to be viewed as criminal behavior - but I digress) - not our electronic mail (yet). If you’re going to scam me, at least do your research.