Google Ate My Spam

It's not often that Bill Blunt waxes lyrical about a product. It takes more than the inducement of a free razor and gel to prod Bill into endorsing something, as my regular readers will know. At the same time, I think I have been around long enough to know when a product doesn't deliver.

I'm of a generation that thought the Welfare State was designed expressly to prevent anyone under the age of 70 ever having to encounter reformed bits of pig, still less to have to eat the stuff. I know there are some (mainly those who lived through the War) who will try to tell you that Spam has it's virtues, but I'm not one of them. Too many Spam fritters for school lunch made that inevitable, I'm afraid. That's why, when I learned that Googlemail had a 'Spam Filter', I was fairly relaxed. I wanted nothing to do with the stuff.

Thanks to the eagle eye of my son, Justin, however, I now realise there's another meaning to the word 'Spam'.

'Pa,' he said, just yesterday ... 'take a look at THIS!' With the flick of a mouse, he took me to a place I never knew existed.

I've had a Googlemail account for over four years. It was Justin who persuaded me to become one of what he termed the 'early adopters'. What he failed to do, however, was tell me that Googlemail has a very sophisticated 'Spam Filter'. It came as something of a shock to discover that the Mighty Google was able to weed out a huge amount of supposedly 'unwanted' mail. 24,572 items, in fact.

Call me an investigative journalist if you must, but I was intrigued to find out exactly what it was that Google was automatically filtering out of my in-box. Well, here it is...


As you can see, GoogleMail has not only prevented me from winning a vast array of international lotteries over the last 4 years, but has also denied me the ability to help an awful lot of people in Africa - many of whom are apparently distantly related to me, and who have been involved in tragic accidents. If the Mighty Google had only kept it's nose out, I could even have had a larger manhood, with access to almost unlimited supplies of cheap Viagra.

I, for one, would quite like to have made contact with the lovely-sounding Loreta Tamala, Rene Cammie et al, but I suppose it's too late now.

It's pure speculation as to whether my life would have been different without the interference of the Googlemail spam-filter. But I can't help feeling that being a multi-millionaire, distributing my largesse across the African continent, and availing myself of a more pronounced manhood, would have made the last four years altogether more interesting.

When I tried to explain this to Justin, he merely laughed. I can only put that down to the folly of youth. It's more than slightly annoying that I've missed such a myriad of opportunities... thanks to the so-called (for that is exactly what it is) Googlemail spam filter.