Yes, I lived in Fayetteville, N.C., for a couple of decades once. Loved the place deeply and fought for it.

In a fit of nostalgia, I signed up for the Fayetteville online newspaper's daily email updates.

I had been warned by another former Fayettevillite that they were a dreary imitation of the real thing. Thanks to my journalist friend, I was not crestfallen when they arrived -- a wad of dysfunctional HTML, marked by a goodly number of broken image links.

Then, blissfully, they stopped coming.

Well, they stopped coming right through to my desktop mailbox, because the Fayetteville Observer fixed all of those broken image links.

Some of them proved to be animated ads, you see.

When my perimeter defense service sees animated ads in a newsletter, it is moved out of the "pedestrian but acceptable newsletter" category and into the "objectionable spam" category.

I have objectionable spam quarantined, so that I can delete it en masse out on Postini's servers. That saves bandwidth, processor cycles and my time.

Thank you, Postini.

This is the first time an online newspaper email update that I receive has transformed itself into objectionable spam merely by fixing the broken parts.

Do they not know, I wonder, that a great many email filters are carefully tuned to dump animation-laced mass emails into the spam bucket, or put them summarily out with the trash?

That is not an exotic, hard-to-grasp, difficult-to-discover little tip. In their business and mine, it is common knowledge. We're expected to know, and act on it. On the other hand, online newspapers are notoriously self-destructive.