Subterfuge

If your messages are getting blocked by a spam filter, the most common culprits are attachments, pictures or keywords. Attachments are generally necessary, and you should avoid including pictures or other “prettyfiers” in your email, but most people are unaware that the actual words they use in a message can kill their chances for successful delivery. Some common words to avoid are:

Free!
50% off!
Click Here
Call now!
Subscribe
Earn $
Discount!
Eliminate Debt
Double your income
You're a Weight Winner!
Reverses Aging
Information you requested
“Stop” or “Stops”
Lose

You can find more examples of words to avoid but these are rather general except for porn et cetera which use many subterfuges. Subterfuge is not a word we use everyday. Instead we use words such as deceit, connive, scheme, scam, deception and ploy among others. We could also use delude or ruse to describe scammers or manipulators who describe schemes to deceive us.

It amazing how subtle some are in luring the unsuspecting into their ambushes. As I write, the media is revealing how brazen mortgage lenders (among other schemers) manipulated the yesterday’s real estate market. We witnessed this when we lived in Phoenix where modest houses doubled or more in price in a short time, creating a fictional housing market. The manipulators laughed all the way to the bank as prices skyrocketed beyond the means of ordinary people.

How does this kind of thing happen? Because people are gullible? Or easily manipulated? Or opportunists? Everyday I delete from my computer enticements that often sound too good to be true. Here’s a few of these that just invaded my territory: Free gift cards; Buy a new home for $1.00 down; Get your bottle of Body Pro Hoodia now (and lose ten pounds in six days); Predatory Lending Practices (actually a warning against such schemers); I’ll pay you to find people: $1,000, $4,000, $11,000 ; You qualify for a $10,000 line, Dan and on and on.

There are many programs designed to delete these before you see them (the danger here is something you may want to receive gets the boot). Other programs shunt them off into another folder where you can quickly look them over and then send them into the wastebasket (or recycle bin). None of these seem perfect but they are often helpful, especially if 80% of your email is spam.

Now, as seniors we didn’t have these problems as we were growing up. But we did have the suave snake oil salesmen which means that hucksters have been around since the serpent beguiled Even in the Garden of Eden. Quacks and shysters have been with humankind for millennia. The only difference is the techniques used. If Eve would have had a computer with e-mail, she no doubt would have had enough span to feed her family.
Subterfuge is an unenviable lifelong accomplice eager and willing to seduce, sell or solicit anything that is marketable, good or bad, beneficial or otherwise. True, we can lock our doors and smash our computers but there has to be a better way. Blessed are those who find it.