Angelfire, e-mail and SPAM

Now that I had e-mail, I could start a website. Man, I burned cyber-rubber on my way back to Angelfire to sign up for that free home page. Well, it might not have been that fast. Actually in the interim, I had spent several weeks discovering that friends of mine had e-mail, and spamming them with a flurry of jokes. SPAM was a new concept. I had not yet been on the receiving end of it. Back then, SPAM was a fairly new concept. There was SPAM, but we were not yet experiencing massive amounts of it. The SPAMbots had not yet begun to devour our free time. Those were the glory days of e-mailing. Then, the spiders were quietly building their web. Still in the creeping stage, they were secretly harvesting e-mail addresses. And they were laying their egg sacs, biding their time. But I was no professional SPAMMER. I was merely a hapless fly. A Bugbones-style splat in the middle of their web. Like all newbies, I sent out my jokes. I once asked a friend if she minded. "Well," she said, "yours are not bad. At least your jokes are funny. I think you must just send the best ones you get." (Yes, I do, preen, preen.) "But it would be nice if you'd send an actual letter now and then." I took her advice, and from there out, I toned down the jokes and sent more letters.

Oh, the perils of Bugbones.