Thankful Thursday: Looking for a silver lining

Last fall I decided to do some at-home laptop repairs. In the end, it bought me about six more months of using that old laptop, and saved me a bunch of money. The parts I ordered cost about $100 -- that's less than the labour charges I would have paid if I'd taken it to a geek. Yay!

Unfortunately, there was a hidden cost: one of the two vendors I used sold my contact information to a spam generator.

78 spam messages
in LESS THAN 12 hours!

Un-freaking-believable.

I realize it's all going into the Junk folder, but I worry that a stray non-junk e-mail will be thrown out with the bathwater. (For some odd reason, e-mails from Steve frequently get diverted to the junk folder.)

I already had two alternative e-mail addresses, so I've been gradually changing all of my subscriptions and logins over to my new preferred address. I'll keep this spam-magnet one for a while, in case people who contact me only infrequently still use it.

In the meantime, I am genuinely thankful for spam filters. Sad that such things have to exist, but glad that someone has put time and effort into automatically sifting the wheat from the chaff, so I, for the most part, don't have to. That is today's silver lining.

If only they could do the same for my snail mail.