Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam

"I know you sent your response by email," the young associate told me yesterday, "but I didn't see it until after Thanksgiving when I got back from my vacation." She was asking for additional time to complete her Reply Brief.

"What happened?" I asked. I had sent the response on the 17th of November -- plenty of time, from what we'd talked of before, for her to receive it and start in on her reply.

She sounded a little sheepish: "It was trapped in my spam filter."

I tried to come up with some witty response about how her firm's server shouldn't be making that kind of automated judgment about the quality of my work product, but she continued. "I get 400 emails a day."

"400?" I asked, incredulous. "What are you doing online?" I can get 200 on a bad day -- when the members of the State Bar listservs get particularly agitated about something -- but never 400.

"It's not just me," she said quickly. "I looked into it -- because, you know, some of these were, uh, kind of embarrassing. I found out it's what comes into the firm server, because we all have the same firm address." Hers is a medium size firm for Chicago, probably no more than 30 attorneys.

"Kind of makes you wonder what the partners are doing behind the closed doors," I said.

She agreed. Moral of the story is this: Don't go walking into the partner's office without knocking first. Who knows what's on their computer screen?
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I get my share of spam, of course. Not a week goes by where the relative of some obscure, but now deposed African politician isn't asking very politely me for my banking information so they can transfer millions... even hundreds of millions... to my account. Sometimes it's an investment banker who has the millions of some mysterious foreigner who has died rich, but childless. Sometimes I'm the long lost relative... sometimes I'm just the trusted professional the banker needs to handle the transaction... and the banker is always willing to split the pot with me... so long as I provide that banking information.

Even despite the spam, I like email. I can't believe, as Richard Roeper claims, in this morning's Chicago Sun-Times, that email has been around for 35 years already. What I do believe is that email has one significant and overriding advantage over the telephone: I've never been called out of the bathroom to answer an email.
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Unscientific survey

How many emails do you get in a day?
Bonus Questions: Do you ever send or receive blog posts by email? Do you have a funny story about spam? (As always, keep it clean.... Use euphenisms as necessary.)