I have no idea what I'm doing up at this hour, either. But while I'm here, I might as well post something about bogus e-mails that pretend to be from PayPal or your bank or some other business institution. I get about twenty a week that tell me there's some problem with my account at Chase Manhattan Bank and, of course, I've never had a nickel in Chase Manhattan.
If things like this are causing you any confusion or problem, here's an idea you might want to consider: Dedicated e-mail addresses. A lot of people think they can only have one or only manage one. Actually, you can many different ones and if you bank, let's say, at Bank of America, you could have an e-mail address that's only for your correspondence with Bank of America. Once you've set it up, you can just assume all e-mails that purport to be from Bank of America but arrive at other e-mail addresses are phony.
I have a separate e-mail address for each of about two dozen companies with which I do real business. That doesn't sound as difficult to manage as it might because they're all set to forward to one master "business" e-mail account so when I download messages, I download them all at once. It's simple then to have the program I use to manage e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and wonderful) filter the incoming e-mail on that account and sort the messages into separate folders — the ones from my bank into one folder, the ones from the Gas Company into another and so on.
How can you get so many different e-mail addresses? Well, I control several domains and each domain gives you unlimited e-mail addresses @ that domain. You could achieve the same thing with several of the free e-mail services online. G-Mail, for instance, will let you sign up for as many accounts as you like and you can set each account to forward to another. If you're on AOL, I believe they still give you a number of screen names on each account.
Multiple e-mail addresses can be very handy for weeding out unwanted e-mail or separating the e-mail you really care about from the stuff you sort-of care about. I have a couple of accounts that I use when I have to sign up for something on a website — "junk mail" addresses, you might call them. If you have everything coming to one e-mail address, it swells the mailbox you care about and when you download your important e-mail, you have to download all those ads and newsletters with it. Most of my "robotic" e-mail — mass mailings from companies I've ordered from, for example — goes to one special address which I download once or twice a week. This separates them from my main e-mail account which receives messages several times a day.
Multiple e-mails and e-mail forwarding are easy to set up with most programs. Just something you might want to consider.