As much time and hassle as it saves me, handling my accounts online isn’t completely free of drawbacks. Although I may provoke a flurry of patronizing tsk-tsking from the online-security paranoiacs, the drawbacks I’m going to address don’t have to do with whatever chance might exist of my identity being stolen. I’m talking about the unwanted extra email that so many of my online accounts continually send me, no matter how many times I “unsubscribe” from these “special offers and information for account holders,” or whatever the euphemism may be.

Let’s illustrate this bitch. On my Citi/AT&T Universal Card, I signed up as per usual for the “paperless” option—online statements, online auto-payments, emailed confirmations thereof, and emailed notices in case of any problems with limits or payment processing. When I selected these services, I was careful to specify my desire to receive no other emails from the credit card other than these specific statement and payment notices. Nevertheless, here is a junk email I received from them this morning. Highlighted at the bottom is the teeny-tiny “unsubscribe” link, which I clicked.

The link directed me to this page. Notice my unequivocal selection of the option that most nearly equates to “don’t send me any of the bullshit above—just the essential messages I need to see.”

That nice, inviting “Save Preference” button led me down the garden path to this:

Oh fuck me. Well, that was time well spent.

So that maybe something good can come of my little run-around, here’s an annotated version of that last disclaimer which the bailout babies at Citigroup can have for free:

Credit: hegarty_david (Flickr)

Throughout the nearly four years of this blog’s existence, the Akismet plugin has consistently kept C&B free of comment spam. As I understand it, what Akismet does with my blog comments is pretty much the same thing that spam filters do with your email inbox. There is one difference, though, at least in my experience.

I use Gmail, and I’d estimate that maybe four or five spam emails per month manage to sneak past Gmail’s filters and get to my inbox. No big deal. Once or twice a month I scroll quickly through my Gmail spam folder to check for false positives, and there normally are one or two. Pretty good spam blocking overall, wouldn’t you say? Me too.

Well, get this: in the history of this blog, I cannot recall even once finding a false positive in my Akismet comment spam queue. On perhaps five or six occasions, spam comments have eluded Akismet and temporarily appeared on C&B. I keep a pretty close eye on comment activity here, since cultivating comment activity is an important goal for any blog. I can use all the legitimate comments I can get, so I check the comment spam queue regularly, hoping to find a false positive. But there never is. Stupid Akismet. Stupid… unfailingly accurate, reliable Akismet.

The most nearly admirable thing that can be said about spammers is that they consistently become cleverer and more sophisticated. This morning a comment in the Akismet spam queue almost fooled me for a moment, using a certain ploy more authentically than I’d seen before from a spam bot. Seeing as how I live in Hollywood, you’d think my Empty Flattery Detector would be more highly-attuned than average.

Check out the ego-stroking comment highlighted in the image at left. “Well, mister commenter,” I thought, “I really hope you mean that. Your URL does look a little spammy… but maybe you really are an actual person, sitting in front of your screen at your crappy web store call center job, and you really do think I’m a professional-caliber writer.” As the green markings show, I googled the email address to find out.

The result:

“Pfft! I knew it. You rat bastard, you say that to all the blogs.”