“First, I must solicit your confidence in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and top secret. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make anyone apprehensive and worried, but I am assuring you that all will be well at the end of the day. I have decided to contact you because of the urgency of this transaction.”

Me? Really? Wow. This guy, Mr. Ado Mohammed, wants me to pose as the next of kin for some guy who died in Nigeria. I can get 30 percent of $26.5 million!

“Kindly get to me immediately through my e-mail address above furnishing me with your most confidential telephone and fax numbers so that I can forward to you the details of this transaction.”

But wait. Someone else needs my assistance too:

Anslen Ike, the only son of a diamond corporation owner, needs me to act as his late father’s business partner, and I’ll get 15 percent of $27 million. “All I need from you is to furnish me with your full details your name your telephone, fax and bank account numbers for me to do the change of ownership.”

Sorry, Ike, I’d rather listen to Mr. Mohammed. He’ll give me more money.

That is, of course, if either of you were real.

Yes, it’s that wonderful side effect of e-mail accounts – scams, schemes and mass mailings – that we call junk e-mail or spam (lowercase, mind you, because the real SPAM is good). The popular theory is that this name came from a skit on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” in which a lady could not order food because she was drowned out by Vikings and their repetition of that renowned luncheon meat. The sea of spam mail, then, drowns out actual Internet conversations and letters. There is a distinction between mass mailings (the original spam) and junk mail, but that distinction has blurred somewhat, and I’m talking about both here.

Letters like those above, both of which I’ve actually received, are so pervasive that a Des Moines Register article reports the Secret Service has a task force looking into schemes like that.

And speaking of reports .

“Remember to e-mail a copy of this exciting message after you have put your name and address next to Report #1 and moved the others down to #2 through #5 as instructed above. One of the people you send this to may send out 100,000 or more e-mails – and YOUR name will be on every one of them!”

That’s from the other type of junk mail I’ve received – the good old chain letter. Over a dozen of these identically worded messages have shown up in my mailbox. One was the same message with a twist – it had been translated into French and back into English. It’s amazing how incomprehensible a little translation can make it.

How does this program work? Well, I am supposed to “order” a “report” from five people for $5 each, move the names and add mine. “Within a week or so you will receive, via e-mail, each of the 5 reports from these 5 different individuals. Save them on your computer so they will be accessible to you to send to the thousands of people who will order them from you.”

Didn’t we outlaw chain letters? Ah, but see, in this version, “you are offering a valuable product for sale and getting paid for it.” Therefore, it’s legal. You are buying and selling “valuable” reports like “The Insider’s Guide To Sending Bulk E-mail On The Net” and “How To Send Out One Million E-mails For Free.”

At least the account I’m getting these from isn’t a web-based program. I’m certain that if I ever decided to sell my soul to Hotmail, I’d get tons of messages a day, even more than I get now. They’d be from people like [email protected] and [email protected] (actual addresses I’ve seen) offering me credit cards, low-interest-rate home loans, even a university diploma. If you didn’t consider the chain letters to be spam, these certainly are. Perhaps the senders got the idea from one of those “reports.”

Preying on the gullible, skirting around the law, and being more annoying than a telemarketer. Just another day going through the spam box. The best part is, like tossing letters in the wastebasket, the delete key works wonders.

But if I do what this letter says, I can. oh, wait. Never mind. That one’s asking if I want to see a porno.

Jeff Morrison is a sophomore in journalism and political science from Traer. He is a copy editor for the Daily.