Cancelling the X Rating

Enough already! I have taken away the 'adult content' notification from my Passionate Crone poetry blog. Just couldn't cope with the level of sex-spam received thereafter, as previously reported. I decided my poetry is innocuous compared to real porn. Even the erotic stuff employs few four-letter-words or explicit descriptions. (I'm more likely to talk of 'flying' than 'coming', for instance.) After all, I'd rather use asterisks occasionally than have my work equated with hard-core material. The whole exercise was useful, I guess, for me to arrive at that conclusion.

The emails haven't stopped yet, though my spam filter is now identifying most of them as what they are. 'Give it time,' I thought. Then I found out my husband's getting a sudden spate of them too. So it can't have been the blog. None of his are x-rated.

Then today I received a very interesting email, which my mail program has labelled junk mail – quite correctly, I believe. It tells me I may need to update my anti-virus settings asap as my PC could have become infected. It lists nasty possibilities such as identity theft, spyware and so on, and helpfully provides several clickable links to enable me to get the sender's anti-virus program pronto. I use a Mac, so am less likely to have been infected ... but I do wonder if this timely offer is mere coincidence or something more sinister. I was already thinking seriously about installing a better spam filter. Spam is not necessarily the same thing as a virus, but may well carry at least one.

How did these people know I needed increased protection? Was it just a lucky guess? Or is it a set-up? A protection racket, in fact?