Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam ...

• Author: Collins, Gail
• Position: Editorials

Byline: GAIL COLLINS

I would like to take time now to thank everyone who sent me holiday messages via the Internet: The wishes of good cheer, the reports of family achievements in the year past, and the multiple requests for my email or bank password.

Possibly that last group was not acting on its own volition. Just last week I got a note from novelist Erica Jong asking for my email password, and another from historian Carol Berkin requesting my Bank of America account number. Thanks to my skills as a journalist, I instantly deduced that both were fraudulent.

Also, I had immediate doubts about a message from another prominent author I know, offering to help me turn my computer "into a money-making machine.'' And I quickly figured out that the email I appeared to have sent myself, offering an inside track on "male penis meds'' did not really come from me.

I have been feeling pretty darned proud of my own increasing technological sophistication. True, I am still not fully skilled in the operation of our home television, but I blame that on Time Warner Cable, which is responsible for half the problems in our modern world. Someday, we're going to find out it was Time Warner Cable that screwed up the Obamacare website, and then I will say that I told you so.

On the plus side, I've refrained from responding to a number of people in my address file who suddenly wrote to announce that they were stranded in remote locations and in desperate need of a money transfer. My husband, Dan, got one recently from a woman who begged him to send her money to get back from Japan. He quickly deduced that if the situation had been genuine, she would not be reaching out to the people who adopted her poodle in 2009.

Our sense of being in semi-control may not last long. Finn Brunton, the author of "Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet,'' says scammers are getting more sophisticated, scrubbing their targets' Facebook pages to pull out details that will make the pleas for help more convincing. (What if the Japan email had said: "Dan -- do it for the dog!'') In self-protection, Brunton says he's avoided ever getting a Facebook page: "Whenever there's a new privacy scandal I say -- being friendless pays off again.''

A lot of the old classic email come-ons are now relegated to spam limbo before we even set eyes on them. I like to visit them occasionally and say a mental hello to Sung Lee of Hong Kong, who is unflagging in his attempts to get me to accept a money...