Every day, I get up early, come into the office, and feast on a diet of spam, spam and more spam.

That’s not &uot;SPAM,&uot; the famous spiced meat they cook up 20 miles east of here; it’s &uot;spam,&uot; lower case. That’s the slang word for junk e-mail sent out to thousands of recipients in the vain hope that somebody somewhere will read it and buy something or visit a Web site or fall for some scam.

Well, somebody’s got ahold of the two e-mail addresses here at the Tribune where the paper gets most of its mail, and whenever I check it, I get a virtual tidal wave of spam.

This is the Web’s version of telemarketing. The good part about it is that you can just delete it.

But the spammers have gotten more clever. They know that most people with more than a week’s experience with e-mail will instantly delete anything that smells like spam. So they try to make things look like you might actually care, hoping you’ll open the message. Things like &uot;Important message&uot; or simply &uot;Attn: Dylan.&uot; Sneaky jerks.

So I spend more time deciding which of my messages are actually worth opening than I do reading the few important e-mails that are buried somewhere in that pile of metaphorical mystery meat.

Since I’m in the news business, I also get a ton of stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily call spam, but is probably the journalistic version of it. I’m talking about news releases from the Baltimore Area Chamber of Commerce, the Tulsa, Oklahoma Indoor Roller Rink, and about a million other businesses, organizations and PR agencies that must buy a list of all newspaper e-mail addresses and send their junk to every last one.

This is why I’m wary when I see a message titled &uot;News release.&uot; It could be anything, and usually it’s something I couldn’t care less about. It may seem like it’d be easy to just open the message and find out, but when I fall for that, it often takes several seconds for the message to load, and when you multiply that by 100 messages, I’m starting to waste some serious time.

Here are some of my favorites that I’ve actually received: &uot;Don’t drink and shop during holidays.&uot; &uot;Amazing light pens make great gifts.&uot; &uot;Man eats own face at holiday party.&uot;

And here’s a log of the subject lines of the messages that came over in the span of a few hours recently:

Overwhelmed by Debt?

Your Favorite TV Series on DVD or VHS

Earn your degree online

Lose 22.5 lbs in 3 weeks!

Don’t Miss Out, enter TODAY!

You are always a winner at Winnersplay!

Fill out Surveys and Win Cash!

#22957 Unclaimed Funds Notification

Get $500 cash by tomorrow.

SeaSilver Liquid Vitamin &045; FREE SHIPPING

$150 FREE BONUS CASH FROM ONLUCK CASINO!

Confirmed cash prize for: Dylan Belden

Dylan &045; Your Limo Has Arrived.

Your credit report

Free instant loan quote

Look at all that stuff I’ve won, all those unclaimed funds, all those great deals! Who actually falls for this stuff?

One last point about spam. I have always wondered what that big company 20 miles east of here thinks about their product becoming synonymous with this junk e-mail. Here’s an excerpt from their Web site addressing the matter:

&uot;Use of the term ‘SPAM’ was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which a group of Vikings sang a chorus of &uot;SPAM, SPAM, SPAM&uot; in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.

&uot;We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.&uot;

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden@albertleatribune.com (but no spam, please).