Internet legend wants it that exactly thirty-three years ago the first ever spam email was sent out. An ambitious salesman of the Digital Equipment Corporation sent out invitations to the presentation of their new operating system to about four hundred recipients. Since then, spam has developed as much as the Internet itself. According to popular media, it is now a branch of international organised crime. And in this multi-million dollar enterprise there is a niche reserved for our profession. Yes, apparently there is money to be made off the relatively small community of exact scientists and perhaps we can consider this a reassurance in our ongoing plight to prove our relevance to society. I refer to the unsolicited email I receive that targets my profession as "edelspam". In modern terms, this email has been "socially engineered" to some extent and sometime straddles the boundary of the admissible and the vulgar.

At the bottom of the edelspam league is the message from a system administrator prompting us to reconfirm our university account - usually by sending out username and password to a thinly concealed private address like "[email protected]". I fail to see the point of this attack, unless it be to hijack an inconspicuous email identity to send more spam from or to sell subtle increases of letter grades submitted online. In any case, it is a little hard to feel sympathy for those who fall prey among the intellectual upper crust.

One step up is the invitation to propose a book. Such proposals can come from apparently respectable publishers and sound honourable at first. At closer inspection, there is no word in the message that indicates the sender knows about our interests and at even closer inspection we notice we are expected to provide the funds. As a side note, I am not sure any more what a respectable publisher is. World Scientific, home to our beloved Journal on Bifurcation and Chaos, recently hit a historic low by offering us a free excerpt from a book on tsunami survival, followed one week later by a special offer for the item in question - while the struggle for survival of tens of thousands in North-Eastern Japan was in full swing.

Next we have the bogus conference. Again, it may look respectable from the top, but the crucial information is often at the bottom. Did you know that Caracas, Venezuela, is such a lively hub of conference organisation? And while I am on the topic, what happened to the information I submitted to the SIAM meeting on PDEs and dynamical systems in Barcelona last year? I have never received so many announcements for conferences in Spain, distributed by an institute named CIMNE with whom I never dealt directly.

At the top of the table, however, I would like to place a recent message the dean of my faculty received. This message announced that during the upcoming ICIAM meeting in Vancouver, short movies about selected mathematics departments would be shown at a central location. And guess what? Out of a "number of leading University Departments", UOIT was selected as an example of "thought leadership"! What an honour for this small, young university to be chosen over, well, pretty much any other post-secondary institute in the world. A colleague asked who sent this invitation. Was it, by any chance, the wife of a late Nigerian prince? No, the message originated from WebsEdge, a "global leader in conference TV and web-based TV channels for the public sector organisations". How is there money in that? Here is the catch: WebsEdge offered to come to Ontario to shoot the five-minute promotional video provided we covered the cost of US$20,000.

After exchanging a few emails with the organisation of ICIAM, we knew that WebsEdge would indeed be present, although its name is not mentioned anywhere on the ICIAM web pages. Spam rhymes with scam, but the two are not the same. In any case, we decided this opportunity was not worth twice the average annual operating grant in our field and moved on. I am looking forward to the meeting in Vancouver, though. If I can find the screen, I will see who was netted in the most area-specific spam attack I have seen so far.

Lennaert van Veen