"If Your Phone Rings and Nobody's There--It'll Be Me"

My mother always told me I would get in trouble for trying to be too clever. Looks like she had the right dope.

I sent an email to a bunch of my friends--maybe you got it--and asked a favor. But I couldn't help myself. I festooned it with cute: "Trust me," I said, "I will not ask for your password, and will not require you to deposit a $10,000 good faith fee in a foreign bank account."

Well, I should have remembered that it doesn't make sense to yell "Hi, Jack!" in the airport security line. My friend Toni reports:

I just found your email in my "junk" box because my mail program looks for certain phrases that indicate it might indeed be an invitation to bail out a Nigerian in distress etc. etc., so by telling us you were not enlisting us in such a scheme, and by using similar words to do so, it triggered the "junk" alert ... .

Here's the message I got above your email: "Appears to be advance fee fraud (Nigerian 419)."

A mail program that's too smart for its own good I guess...

Ah, you are too kind. I'm sure it is I, not the program, who is (acting) too smart for his own good. Of course, as Toni observes the same disappearing-message thing " I suppose could be happening to this very email I'm sending to you!" Right, except that it didn't. So what have we learned? We've learned that Toni's security program is more careful than mine.

Update: He could have asked us.

PS: I have no idea why this message is appearing in a weird type face all of a sudden.