Unsubscribed

Somebody sold my email address.

Recently.

Suddenly my spam mailbox became full daily.

I have of course been getting the usual conglomeration of offers of millions of dollars from complete strangers who thought I might fall for their scam if they called me "Beloved". And crude sexual invitations which use enough symbols to escape the filters but not too many to obscure the message have arrived with great consistency for a long time. The product offers for something to increase the size of body parts I do not possess have pretty much dwindled away.

Just before Thanksgiving my inbox started getting flooded. Realtors want to sell my home for me. Auto companies want to sell me their cars. All kinds of products actually on the market were being shilled, though whether by their actual distributors, who can tell? The funny part, if there is one, is that the Black Friday sales offers still haven't stopped. The Christmas shopping offers are just beginning to blanket my mailbox.

Timely, eh? Who spends money to sell stuff with that kind of promptness? Or perhaps more to the point (not knowing exactly how it works) who pays somebody else to advertise for them well after the fact? Somebody is being scammed here, and I suspect it's not me.

The nice thing is that each product ad comes with an "unsubscribe" link. I click it. Yes, I know that some of those simply verify the correctness of the email address. However, the volume of crap is tapering off, although Ugg boots can't seem to get it right. Realtors, banks, and auto dealer ads are going away. I'm finally getting fewer Black Friday ads.

The sex requests are still holding steady, never fear. They don't come with an "unsubscribe" link, and even if they appeared to do so, I would not even give them that much attention.

Delete.