SpamSieve is the best spam filter I’ve ever used in my life, and it’s made my e-mail reading much more efficient and pleasant than it once was.

A few bits of junk sneak through, but it’s probably one every two or three days, instead of several daily offers for luxury Rolex watches at 80% off, or various ways to take advantage of the ATTRACTIVE PRICE on Cializ and Viagre, so she won’t laugh at my noodle every day.

Recently, however, this managed to evade the filters:

mort You computer was infected by our software!
If you will not buy our software – you will bee lost all data on your PC!

It closes with a URL to purchase the software, presumably so the e-mail’s recipient can respond to the comical extortion attempt.

I laughed when I read it. I mean, it’s obviously a load, so I junked it and went on with my day. I kept thinking about it, though: an intelligent person will see right through this and junk it. I’ve already updated my corpus to catch future attempts to convince me I “will bee lost all data” on my PC. But the spammer isn’t looking to ensnare an intelligent person; the spammer is looking to ensnare exactly the kind of person who reads the e-mail, and sees it as a serious threat.

“This was clearly written by an idiot,” the victim would think. Then, after a moment’s consideration: “But what if he’s serious?! I don’t want to bee lost all data on my PC! I’d better do what he says!” Click. Boom.

There are a lot of us who have been online since the Internet was a series of networked BBSes. Some of us remember closed systems like Compuserve and GEnie. We remember what it was like to wait twenty minutes to download a GIF at 28.8, and how magnificent it was to see a weather satellite image on a university’s T1-connected computer.

We see through these scams because we pre-date the scammers, but there are lots of people — and I’m not just talking about our parents and grandparents — who just don’t know any better. They run unpatched machines, leave their routers set to their default passwords, and are prime phishing targets, simply because this technology is, to them, indistinguishable from magic.

As the Internet becomes a more integral part of everyone’s lives, we’re going to encounter more and more people who don’t understand its inner workings any more than I understand how to take apart my car’s diesel engine for fun and profit. I believe that we have a responsibility to these people, to help educate and enlighten them, so they understand how to protect themselves online.

Think of this another way: if we don’t help people understand how to protect themselves from spammers and phishers, how can we expect them to understand the importance of network neutrality?