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I signed up for the McDonald's email newsletter because at the time it was offering free cinema tickets to a Disney film. And because I'm a bit tight, that sounded like a good deal.

I signed up for a Microsoft Office newsletter after an internet rumour of free Amazon vouchers (which proved not to be true in my case). HMV? That'll be the exclusive offers to subscribers, which don't seem all that exclusive to me once I've found out what they are. How many more times can they try to sell me a Friends boxset that I don't want?

CD Wow? That was the potential for free vouchers. Borders? There was a sniff of 20 per cent off. Pizza Hut? I simply can't remember, but free food is very much a candidate.

All offers considered

Which brings me to this moment. As I sit here perusing my inbox, I can't help but paint the shameful picture of a man who, while he wouldn't sell a relative or anything that clichéd, would certainly accept a tirade of spam in exchange for the mere sniff of getting something worth a fiver or so for free.

Only it's not spam, is it? How can it be spam when I've all but invited it into my home, made it a cuppa and stuck the fire on for it? The spam filters don't catch it because there's nothing to catch, and I've let some of these newsletters seep into my inbox for years in the

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hope of getting a pound off a pizza, or a 10-minute jump start on an online sale - along with thousands of others who signed up for the same reason.

But that was then, this is now.

For reasons I can't fathom but must put down to laziness (which is a far better reason than holding out hope for another freebie) I've never bothered to unsubscribe to many of these before. I know it's crazy; all it takes is a click at the bottom of an email. But in the same way that, ahem, I used to ring up for catalogues when I was 14 simply because I wanted some post, I was still at the stage where the morning contents of my inbox made me curious. I like the idea of receiving 24 new messages but, routinely, 22 of them prove to be rubbish - and it serves me right. For while the spam filter will, on the whole, eat the junk, the rubbish that I've asked for is smiling away on my screen. Smugly.

They had to go.

Hilariously, when you try to unsubscribe, many of the senders direct you to a splash screen where they try to convince you to keep receiving the messages, telling you what unparalleled human joy lies within them. Never mind the fact that I've fallen for their teasing, tantalising temptations before and woken up the morning after feeling disappointed, with not even a pizza, coffee or free cinema ticket on my bedside table.

Yet I'm still tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt, because who doesn't love a good freebie or a good offer? Isn't that why, in these days of internet shopping, many of us have a cupboard full of stuff we look at every few months and utter one word: why?

Technology experts have been known to remark that the biggest problem with computers is the users themselves. That may be true, but I didn't see any of those experts at a free McDonald's screening of Treasure Planet in 2002. And if that's not worth suffering the 324,895 emails I've received since, I don't know what is.