Spam, Bam, Thank You Ma'am

"Why do you keep sending me links about Viagra?"

This is the message I received from my sisters several weeks ago out of the blue.

"What?" was my response, "obviously, I haven't been sending you them on purpose!"

Emily went on to explain that she and a random other group of people on the Cc list were getting e-mails from me with a message about checking out what smoking does to your body, but when/if you clicked the link, it led to some sort of Viagra website.

Of course, I knew it was some sort of e-mail virus shenanigans that had gained control of my account but it was a huge pain because I have gmail which basically saves every e-mail address you've ever used. Normally handy. Not so, when you've unwittingly become a Viagra salesperson. And to top it all off, one of the repeat receivers happened to be my grandmother.

Trying to do some damage control, I sent out a witty message to several people to warn them of this new development but couldn't figure out where it was coming from so couldn't seem to stop it.

A few weeks later, though, as I went through and cleaned out my junk account not related to Gmail, I saw several mailer deamon returned emails in my spam box. My sister had failed to mention this was the email address the spam was coming from.

With some quick work, I realized most of the contacts it was e-mailing were defunct addresses of friends and family, although some were still legitimate. I deleted my outdated contact list, and for a few weeks that seemed to be the end of it.

On saturday morning, I signed on to my email and saw that I had an new e-mail from myself. Not unusual because I send myself emails just about every day with links, recipes, or other random info I want to access later.

I opened it to see which one is was and saw a garbled message with a link. Confused, and unable to remember what I'd e-mailed myself I clicked on the link. 

I think you can guess where it led me.

I had just been spammed by my own e-mail. 

The ridiculousness of this happening in the tech savvy world we live in was not lost on me. Not only do we have to look out for other people attacking us electronically, we now have to contend with our own e-mail accounts turning on us!

This moment should be a lesson for all of us, to be remembered when companies start trying to market robots to do everything for us. I can tell you from experience how that's going to end up. . .