Oh you should totally disregard emails that start with "dear valued customer". To add some context to this, what Jamie and I are thinking of when we hurl invective at this practice is the specific attempt by recruiters and marketers and the like to get extra chummy with us by pretending to be interested in us by way of some cute reference to our name, which happened after governments made a valiant attempt to counter the effects of spam by trying to provide average users with an easy way to verify that an email was from who it was supposed to be from. The problem is that policymakers didn't think through all the ways this would be misused or how easy it was to spoof and co-opt.