As a fully paid-up geek, I love modern communications technology, but, like everything, it has a downside. Spam email is one of the less agreeable aspects of the whole shooting match, although filtering and a panoply of different email addresses for different purposes help keep its incursion into my busy, exciting life to a minimum. Sometimes, it can even be amusing, such as when some herbert claiming to be Peregrine Worsthorne tried to sell me penis extension surgery.

The other day, I started receiving spam that stood out from the herd of automated cock enhancers. For one thing, it arrived on an email address that I use exclusively for mailing lists, which never normally lets spam through. It also addressed me by name, which is something the auto-stuff never does. By an astonishing coincidence, the first message arrived less than 24 hours after a disagreement with an individual on a mailing list. Could this aggrieved person possibly have entered my name and email address into any number of bobbins self-help websites as revenge for our little set-to? As the person in question claims to be a mature professional with a young family (and a swift Google search supports the claims - the footprint many of us leave online scares me), I'd like to think they were above such antics, but the circumstantial evidence seems to point in that direction.

If so, what were they hoping to achieve? If it was to disrupt my life, they've failed. I have a couple more emails to divert to the trash folder each morning. Boo hoo. If it was to get back at me anonymously, they've failed, because they don't seem to have covered their tracks very well. The only way they'll have succeeded is if they wanted to leave me with the impression that they were a vindictive idiot, but I can't bring myself to believe that anyone would actually want to be thought of as such.