Spam once really, really boiled my blood.
Three years ago, when I signed up for a Hotmail account, I stupidly chose to have my e-mail address listed in the public Hotmail directory - a feature it has wisely discontinued.
At the time, it seemed like a great way to let people who might be trying to find me get in touch.
Not so. My Hotmail address ended up on one - or more - of those massive mailing lists that circulate among the spamming underground.
Now, at least a dozen spam messages pile up in my Hotmail account per day, and on busy weekends I get up to 50.
I used to vigilantly police my in-box, immediately forwarding spam to the Internet service provider from whence it came and demanding the bastards who sent it be banned from the network.
"SPAM from YOUR DOMAIN," I would pound angrily into the subject lines.
But lately, my feelings have changed. Spam just does not bother me all that much anymore.
Don't bother writing to me to explicate the evils of spam. I'm fully versed on the reasons spamming is a crime, of sorts, against humanity.
The Coalition Against Unwanted Commercial E-Mail, among other groups, argues persuasively that spam amounts to a theft of the recipient's computing resources.
And for virtually every ISP, spam is a very real operational problem that chews up bandwidth and server space, and requires squads of staffers to fight.
What's strange to me now, though, is how spam inspires passion normally reserved for much more serious discussions - say, about taxes, guns or the New York Yankees.
An example: Interactive Week recently ran a 69-word item on a survey commissioned by consumer-goods company Unilever that found about 40 percent of Internet users would want to receive information on new products and services without first giving permission. (It was headlined, "Survey Says: Spam Me.")
One reader positively blew his top over this, sensing a perniciousconspiracy at work.
"Does the gist of this piece reflect ZDNet's/InteractiveWeekly's [sic] agenda?" he demanded in an e-mail.
Is spam annoying? Oh, yes, it is - although the mangled verbiage employed by spammers is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. But my point is that most spam is really a low-grade trifle that doesn't cause serious damage.
It's akin to someone flinging a soggy advertising flyer on my porch - rude, annoying and wasteful, perhaps, but it's not like someone took an ax to my front door.
One exception is a truly disgusting form of unsolicited e-mail: pornographic spam sent to children.
This isn't just a harmless irritant, and those who sling this sort of digital dreck ought to be actively shut down.
My general indifference to unsolicited e-mail probably puts me in the minority. Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer at AllAdvantage.com and a longtime anti-spam lobbyist, offered this analysis of my condition: He described an experiment in which laboratory animals were placed in a cage with an electrified floor that shocked them every few seconds.
With each shock, the animals would leap into the air, crying out, until they were eventually too exhausted to jump; they spent the rest of the experiment lying on the ground whimpering. "Like those abused animals, spammers have rendered many consumers too exhausted to protest," he said.
Uh, gee - I don't feel like a lab rat zapped into submission.
I think one reason I don't passionately hate spam anymore is because of the latest spam controls offered by Microsoft's Hotmail, which are fairly effective at sifting out the e-garbage.
Whatever the reason, spam is no longer worth my outrage.
It undoubtedly will continue to anger some people - maybe even most people - but I think at some point pruning out spam will become a routine task, like taking out the digital trash.
