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When we opened our email-mail service this morning, we received the following message:

Dear [Service Provider] User,

To complete your Account Verification process, you are to reply this message and enter your password in the space provided (********), you are required to do this before the next 48hrs of receipt of this e-mail, or your Webmail Account will be de-activated and erased from our database. Your account can also be verified at ... .

I was suspicious almost immediately. Why? Well, let's start by considering the punctuation and grammar of the message. Everyone knows (don't they?) that the proper punctuation following a formal salutation such as Dear ... User is a colon [:] and not a comma, such as appears in this message. The proper punctuation after the brackets with the asterisks (which we were supposed to replace with our password) is a period, because it is the end of a sentence. You, then, the first word of the next sentence, must be capitalized.

The syntax in the message is also faulty, as a careful reading of the first sentence demonstrates: it should read ... you are to reply TO this message - the "to" is missing in the original.. The whole structure "you are required to do this before the next 48hrs of receipt of this e-mail" is also syntactically flawed. Further, formal English writers will usually write forty-eight, rather than simply jot down the integers (48); as well, there has to be a space between forty-eight (or 48) and hrs. Etc.

I am going to save this rather silly document to illustrate to my writing class students just how important the ability to recognize good grammar can be. Even in this rather casual age of email-mail and other forms of text message sending, I think that reputable companies, especially those in the communications business, would be certain to use proper English.

As I thought further about the original message, I really began to chuckle to myself. This hilarity lasted throughout a rather lengthy walk in the woods this morning and an afternoon of puttering around the house, and persisted as I sat down to write this column. Some of you may remember my lamentations in this space a few weeks back over my efforts to have a cell phone contract cancelled. That contract was (is, for all I know) with the same service provider from which this directive was supposedly issued. I thought, and mentioned to Carla at one point that, if I had any doubts about the veracity of the message otherwise, they would be dissipated by the "48hrs" threat; I have been trying for six months to get them to cancel the cell phone account — and there have been times when a forty-eight hour deadline would have seemed a welcome promise rather than a dire threat.

But behind it all, there is something seriously disturbing about this: How many people, especially older people, those who live increasingly in fear of technologically based threats and intimidation, would have complied meekly with this demand?

Oh, by the way, I called the service provider — partly to verify that it was, in fact, spam, but also simply to inform the company that the incident had occurred. I would recommend seriously that anyone who receives anything the least bit suspicious — from whatever source — pick up the telephone and call someone — the company, the police, or even an informed friend. Don't give out that personal information.