As you may have noticed, the volume of spam e-mail is burgeoning to record levels. I know my spam filter swells with offers to enlarge body parts I don't even possess at the rate of approximately 30 or 40 per second, or per square inch, depending how you measure.

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If these hucksters could really expand body parts that dramatically and quickly, they would get a Nobel Prize and enough money to buy Scandinavia and have it bronzed.

I've also noticed a dramatic increase in the number of e-mails that aren't selling anything but still manage to cost me time and my last shreds of sanity. (Now there's something I need enlarged.) They come from real people who are courting a real poke in the eye from those of us with less time on our hands and company e-mail addresses.

In the fine tradition of naming unwanted e-mail after food, I call these messages jif: jejune Internet flotsam. Jif falls into four categories: lame jokes, pointless petitions, political screeds/urban myths and magical mystical blessed good luck chains.

Lame jokes

These are the least annoying, lameness being in the eye of the beholder. I occasionally forward jokes or links myself, though I try to be discriminating. Only the finest of the "I left my husband for the garbage man -- but he wouldn't take him" comedy for my social circle.

Of course, you have to read through all the jokes to find a good one among all the eye-rollers. This is called "research."

Pointless petitions

The only thing more useless than a petition is an online petition.

Most of what they are protesting isn't even happening -- or already happened. No, the FCC is not going to ban references to God, the Brazilian congress didn't cut the rainforest in half, and the anti-abortion activist has been on the FDA reproductive drug panel for years already. But you can still sign on to boycott an upcoming film portraying Jesus as a Chinese bear-farmer.

(I made that up, but I'm hoping someone will actually draft it and start circulating it online. I wonder how many days it would take for me to get a copy. I'm guessing 0.25.)

As Barbara Mikkelson points out at Snopes.com, "petitions aren't the instruments of social change we'd so dearly love to believe they are. Yes, a petition festooned with a zillion signatures can have some influence, but ... those signatures aren't votes, and they aren't treated as such by the governing bodies that have to decide on the tough questions of our times."

If the government wants to know what you think, it will tap your phone.

Political screeds/urban myths

I cannot recommend Snopes.com highly enough. Or often enough. I use it to rain on the parades of people who send me "true facts" and "this is beautiful" e-mails that are riddled with nonsense. The carjack warnings. The bigoted paean to northern white-bread fortitude contrasting can-do blizzard heroes with whining Katrina handout-hogs. (That one has been recirculated several times with all the same "facts" but different cities filled in, Mad-Lib-style.) Misattributed rants, half-baked boycotts and absurd giveaways.

The hilarious part is that these things are passed around as fact by a lot of people who won't believe anything they read in a newspaper. Did I say hilarious? I meant appalling.

Magical mystical blessed good luck chains

Who starts these things? Can we find her, knock the mug of herbal tea out of her hand, pelt her with Snow Baby figurines and threaten to stab her with a guardian angel pin if she doesn't find something sensible to do with her time?

This variation on the old "send a postcard to the name at the top of the list" exercise asks you to believe that God has nothing better to do than count how many times you forward a poorly written prayer framed in animated flying hearts -- and time you.

"Darla Sneem of Grand Forks, this is God. While you forwarded the Lucky Sisterly Angel Blessing to eight people, you failed to include the sender AND you missed the deadline by 4 seconds.

"I was going to grant your fondest wish, winning the Powerball, and make all your dreams come true within the same number of hours as your current age, but instead I will now smite you. You are fundamentally a good person, but you fell down on the FWD:, and the devil is in the details.

"You will be plagued with fake Rolexes and jokes written in terrible Irish dialect. Don't like it?

"Start a petition."