Spam's off

One of the many premier league radio gems Peter Sellers recorded in the late 1950s was Balham, Gateway to the South, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden for the BBC series Third Division. Sellers takes off American newsreel-travelogue host James A. Fitzpatrick in enticing listeners to share the charms of a gormless South London suburb. It ends with the immortal line ''Spam's off, dear!''

The spam in question was short for ''spiced ham'', the repugnant canned pre-cooked meat which, generally, is ''off''. In this wonderful, enlightened electronic age of ours, spam has come to mean something even less digestible: unsolicited emails, otherwise known as junk mail.

This week a Hawker reader wrote to The Canberra Times warning of what she saw as the dangers of opening not a can of Spam but a Facebook account. Her daughter had joined Facebook ''and suddenly I have been inundated with spam mail and begging letters and been targeted by people with viruses to spread''.

Facebook probably isn't to blame. I started a Facebook page for Charlie the Cat, and I'm delighted to say Charlie's innocent young mind remains unsullied by the smut and scum with which spammers pollute the internet.

If I were God for a day, I'd create multiple ricocheting, and jam it right back up the spammers. What delicious fun that would be. Just about any email address will attract what is mildly referred to as junk. One surefire antidote is to create an email address employing an underscore. I administer, for reasons I won't go into, eight email accounts, and only three of them have been contaminated with spam, and one of those is a BigPond account (happily, and quite appropriately, BigPond directed its own ''This month's BigPond Offers'' email into its junk mail box). Hotmail is bad news, Gmail not an awful lot better. One to watch for allegedly comes from Windows Live Hotmail: Be wary, it's a scam, too, as are the ones from PayPal.

Email accounts pretend to offer a fail-safe opportunity to deal with junk mail. One can ''add sender to blocked sender list'' or ''add sender's domain to blocked sender list''. It doesn't always work. Some persistent spammers, such as Canadian Pharmacy, are so virile in efforts to sell me Viagra that it seems able to penetrate all firewalls. Its offshoots, like CanadianMed, keep offering me things I do not need.

Spam has long since ceased to be even mildly titillating, even when, as I was yesterday, one is told of a ''1.5 million win'' by Liverwood Promotions. It's a gullible world, I know, but one wonders if there is anyone left out there who would be even mildly intrigued to receive a email from Mary Synder telling them they had ''been awarded $US1 million in the ongoing USA online lottery''.

There must be few variations on the Nigerian scam left to milk. At Christmas I was offered a ''Land Rover Range Sport 3.0 TDV6 HSE and the sum of 3 million'' - all I had to do in return was send Dave Beam my full name and phone number. Beam me up, Dave.

Alfredo Jose Perez Gonzales, of the ''Western Union Depterment'', awarded me $US50,000, as I had been ''selected through the internet, where your e-mail address was indicated and notified . . . Please provide Mr Lionaldo Vanbastin with details so that your fund will be remitted to you through Western Union.'' Better still, Canadian couple Allen and Violet Large had won a jackpot lottery of $11.3 million and, in their infinite largesse, selected me as one of 10 ''individuals worldwide to benefit'' - they had ''voluntarily'' decided to donate half a million US dollars to me ''as part of a charity project to improve [your] lot''. How on earth did Allen and Violet know my lot needed improving?

There was a catch, however: If I claimed the dough without the correct security code, the authorities would be notified and I'd ''face the full action of Anti-fraud Unit Law''. The cheek of them!

The board of trustees of the International Charity & Human Developmental Organisation offered to help my ''economy growth and personal development for the year 2012'' to the tune of 2.5 million, ''as developmental aid from the UN Foundation''.

Dear old Mrs Edna Etters has ''little time to spend on earth'' and wants to give me 30 per cent of her late husband's $US20 million. Barrister Dominic Edward is also trying to dish out estate money, but wants me to keep the matter ''confidential between you and me''. Sorry, Dominic, no can do.

I was informed there were problems in Libya (as if I didn't know that) and Aisha Mussa Ibrahim, the daughter of Mussa Ibrahim, a former Libyan government spokesman, wants me to handle some of his ''huge amount of money''. Bernard Baruch from St Kitts and Nevis is a merchant in Dubai who lost his wife and three children in a car accident and now has ''esophageal cancer'' and no time left to lament on his wayward life. He was ''never generous'', he says, but in my case is willing to share with me his cash deposit of $US65 million ''which no one knows about''.

The Nigerian does scam roll on, and now the Zenith Bank of Lagos is offering me loans of up to $US5 million at a low 3 per cent interest. Tempting! But some scams are just too ridiculous for words. One wanted to sell me a Rolex watch at a mere $31,350. Don't they know the one I bought for $31 in a back street in Barcelona is still working fine?