I used to loathe old-fashioned junk mail. But after a decade or so dealing with junk email I’ve changed my tune.

While I’m still not wild about snail junk mail, it pales in annoyance compared to electronic junk mail. It’s an easy task to sort through snail mail junk mail.

After taking out anything that could give get fished from my blue cart to fill a 32-gallon trash bag with similar stuff from other residents pilfered by an unscrupulous homeless person or drug addict who can turn it into $20  to $50 a bag from an identity thief, the rest is tossed for recycling.

It’s straight forward. Bills are easy to spot.

Unsolicited information from a company I do business with can be quickly judged as whether they are something I’m interested in.

Magazines I pay for can be pulled out as well as the extreme rare gem — an honest too-goodness personal letter or card.

Not so with email.

For starters, it doesn’t help that I often get in excess of 150 emails a day in my work account even after the spam filter siphons off the subprime junk.

There are some such as daily emails from — and I’m not making this up — “Legalize Ferrets Now” — that get the “define and delete” treatment without opening.

Then there are the breathless emails from Gavin Newsom urging me to send him money because of the urgent need du jour to save California.

He’s the only politician that doesn’t send email releases about issues per se or statements about how offended he is about the latest Trump tweet as the governor does on X.

Newsom just asks for money.

The rest consists of news releases, letters, notices of events, and such.

Even with shortcuts I am now spending more time going through email than I ever did snail mail with all of its old school junk mail.

And unlike with snail mail where you rarely toss anything but junk mail into the trash. that’s not the case with email unless you have the luxury of opening between 100 and 200 emails a day.

The reason we get so much more junk now is simple.

It costs significantly more money, time, and effort to send old school junk mail instead of e-junk mail.

I never thought I’d say this but there’s more thought put into old-fashion junk mail.

Another reason why old school junk mail is marginally better is the fact it’s tough to get a virus that can create havoc on an $800 plus investment such as a computer from opening an offer on a free weekend at a time share in Timbuctoo.

And while junk mail can be pilfered to allow identity thieves to play their trade, it takes them a considerable amount of energy to do so instead of waiting for you to slip up and open the wrong email or make a bad click.

I get that less real junk mail means less trees sacrificed.

That said at least old-fashioned junk mail deteriorates and doesn’t have the shelf life of a Twinkie encased in alabaster wrapped in 7 feet of lead.

Just like all the Tweets you wish you never made, electronic junk mail has eternal life on the Internet. Some anthropologist in the 30th century will likely assume Nigeria was the banking capital of the universe in 2025 and that the country’s princes were the most generous people of our time.

On my personal email it is a different story.

I make it a practice to click on boxes telling companies not to keep me abreast of their breathless advances in retail or how I can save enough money to go to Tahiti by spending money with them. It also prevents me from getting personal offers addressed to “Dennis” from companies seeking a personal touch that then force me to deal with a computer voice system to troubleshoot a problem or connect me with a customer service department in rural Bangkok that has no idea what the company sold me.

Why I never sign up for emails for special offers was reinforced by what I did in July of 2018.

The Sirius radio subscription that came with my Ford Focus expired and I re-upped for the then $9.95 a month.

I inadvertently clicked a confirmation email that I ordered the service without reading the fine print. Bu then again it did not matter whether I read the fine print or not. That’s because in clicking, it that was required to restart the subscription — it wouldn’t happen until I did do — I also authorized to send me offers.

What harm is that, right? After all Sirius, doesn’t exactly have a massive catalogue of services. While that may be true, they are persistent at pushing their phone app and such. Since 2018, I have received an average of two emails a week from Sirius that are basically junk email. To retain service and stop the emails, they have hoops I have to go through.

Had this been 1999, they would have spent their profit for the year from my subscription after the 20th piece of junk mail they sent.

In the era of computer generated email, those e-junk mails probably haven’t even cost them a nickel yet.

I’m not pining for the good old days when junk mail was king and postal carriers got hernias. But at least then some thought was put into it by companies as it cost them time and money.

And you didn’t have to make much of an effort to sort the good stuff from the junk mail and toss the former into the trash.

—  This column is the opinion of Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia. He may be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com