The spammers want to be your friend. At least they want you to think they're your friend. Email marketing pro Patrick Valtin spills some tips in a press release that landed in my inbox. Most of them are no-brainers. But in the endless contest of wits between consumers and the Great American Marketing Machine, it's interesting to see how our adversaries are thinking. Among their wily email ploys:

• -- Address the emailee by his/her first name. "Make the subject line personalized. 'How would you like a free weekend in Acapulco' compared with 'Dear Jane, How would you...' increases by 200 percent to 300 percent your chances it will be opened."
• -- Don't expect the person to buy something from the email right away. Woo him/her. Seduce him/her. Get prospects to join a regular email list and then nail them with the sale later.
•  -- "Make one-time customers into repeat customers. Offer an exclusive newsletter only for customers with highly valuable content." Translation: send your poor customers even more email disguised as a newsletter.
• -- "Have an option for people who subscribe to your newsletter to systematically send it to a friend." Memo to my friends: Don't.

Email marketers would tell you that email for which the recipients clicked "yes" on a Web site two years ago for reasons they no longer remember to answer the question, "Would you like to receive periodic notification of special sales and promotions?" is not spam. I say, if it looks like a canned meat product sold by the Hormel Foods Corp., if it walks like a canned meat product sold by the Hormel Foods Corp...