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Email is on my mind lately. We get a lot of it and most of it falls into the spam, advertising, useless categories. Some of it is amusing, some frightens me. Most of it aggravates me. I do have a sort of guilty pleasure in looking through the emails that qualify as phishing.

Sidebar Comment: I love the sense of humor of the computer geeks who name things. Terms like spam, phishing, virus, worm, hacker … I appreciate the images they invoke and their descriptiveness. Phishing is a way of — well, fishing. And to take it a step further that most fishermen can understand, it’s a way of fishing for suckers using a huge net. Take an absurd premise, for instance one I just read about recently, pretend you are a hired killer. Write up an email that explains what you do for a living, explain to the recipient that you have been hired to kill them, and offer, for a small sum, say $80,000, to NOT do the job. The real premise of a phishing plan is that if you send millions of emails, you only need one or two to pay off. It’s the old $1 chain letter theory … I can make a pretty good paycheck if only a small percentage of people respond.

Anyway, if your junk mail or spam seems to be getting worse, it is. Spammers are constantly coming up with ways to get around any junk mail filters we might add. We used to be able to just build a filter of words we didn’t want to appear in our email, and anything with one of those words would get trashed before we saw it. Consider the unfortunate law firm chosen to represent the pharmaceutical company Merck concerning lawsuits involving the drug Vioxx! I wonder how many of their perfectly legitimate emails actually got through!

One of the reasons you are once again seeing an onslaught of junk email is that spammers are pretty good problem solvers. I can just imagine their brainstorming sessions — if users are filtering for certain words we have to use, how can we get around that. In other words, what will ALWAYS go through a filter? Pictures! Now, spammers just take a picture of the message they want to send you. Your filters and your email programs can’t tell the difference between a picture of a junk message about Viagra and a picture of your favorite grandchild. They’re both going to land in your IN box!

I have no answers, but everyone feels your pain! Consider Grand Valley State University near Grand Rapids, MI. According to an article I read in InformationWeek, this school gets 1.2 million incoming messages per day. Read that again, 1.2 million (per day). As they say in the infomercials on TV … “but WAIT” … consider this … 90% of those 1.2 million messages (per day) are spam.

Now that’s a spam problem.

First, an interesting side note to my Christmas entry about the travels of a young couple from Nazareth to Bethlehem. One of my favorite monthly readings is Harper’s Index column in Harper’s Magazine. The column just publishes various statistics or figures garnered from various other sources, with no commentary and only slightly tongue in cheek juxtapositions. According to the Index in the December. 2006 issue of Harper’s, were Joseph and Mary to make that same trip today, they would be required to pass through at least 10 security check-posts. No comment, as I said, it’s just an interesting side note.

Now on to business…

Just a few thoughts on this weeks news from the 2007 Macworld Expo. There’s a lot of pressure on Apple and Steve Jobs now, as the Macworld Expo has a reputation of being the source of BIG THINGS coming from Apple. Everyone (including yours truly) was expecting the iPhone. The last system update I downloaded sometime in December even included some iPhone software. In addition to the iPhone, we also got AppleTV.

My first impression was relief of the decision NOT to introduce the iTV. I’m getting pretty tired of i-everything. It was clever, now I’m over it. Seems like Apple may have to give up the iPhone name, too, as Cisco has held a registered trademark on that name since June of 2000. Apple was aware of the legal aspect and the two companies were in negotiations at the time of Jobs’ introduction of the device, so Cisco feels they have no choice but to sue Apple over use of the term. Not sure how this is going to play out, but interesting, all the same.

Basically, the iPhone will be a phone, iPod, internet, personal assistant type device at a cost of $499 to $599. It has touch screen controls and as is required of Apple, very sleek and cool design. Not sure I’ll be getting one anytime soon, but if someone wants to send me one for evaluation, I wouldn’t turn it down!

The AppleTV device is interesting for different reasons…no controversy, no pre-release hype. I see it as a part of a well-planned strategy as Apple enters and positions itself in the rapidly growing home network/entertainment/theater market. Their Mac mini was, to my way of thinking, the first foray into this market and I see the AppleTV device as the natural next step. The home entertainment aspect of computers, networks and TV viewing is exploding and is exactly the right place for Apple to go. Nearly every home I can think of has more than one TV, more than one computer, some sort of broadband internet connection, and some sort of TV delivery service such as cable or satellite. Becoming the company or one of the companies that brings all this together could be a very sweet thing.