Chain emails

In the days before the Internet, people used to send chain letters. I don't recall ever getting one but even if I had I wouldn't have passed it on. The process of copying a letter several times, addressing the envelopes and then going to the post office to mail them would have put me off.

Now it is all too easy to send chain letters by email. When you receive one of these emails, you click forward, select the recipients from your address book and then send it on. In less than a minute you've complied with the wishes of the person who produced the email in the first place.

We all have anti-virus software don't we? We spend shed loads of money on this software to protect us from the attack of a virus on our computers. What these programs don't do though is protect us from the spread of viral emails; it is hard to work out how they could.

Early versions of these "chain mails" brought dire warnings of impending viruses. Then we had the harmless good luck pixies and fairies (mostly Irish) that you should pass on or suffer umpteen days of bad luck. More disturbing were the mails that told a tale of some dying child who would receive help from one of the large Internet companies if we passed the message on to enough people. To be fair, most chain emails are either harmless fun or messages of hope for the world. It is easy to understand why they get passed on.

In the case of the email warning us of an impending attack of love.exe, it was the message itself that was the virus and we were being conned into spreading it. Imagine the exponential growth of email traffic as each person sent the mail on to a couple of dozen or more recipients. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and the message was stopped.

The most disturbing aspect of these "chain mails" however, is the fact that most people just pass them on without editing. So what you get is the trail of how the email was sent. I don't suppose many people want their email address bandied round the Internet particularly if they are sending the mail from work.

A case in point:- When I was teaching IT, one of my younger students received a particularly obscene email via his school address. Because nobody had thought to edit the message before passing it on I was able to track the originator of this vile message. I wrote a complaint to the company it came from and received a reply telling me that the person had been severely disciplined. Most companies have very strict policies about Internet use in the workplace.

Experts warn that the Internet will grind to a halt in a few years because of the number of people downloading video and music; both of which eat up vast amounts of bandwidth. The solution is to spend billions of dollars replacing copper cables with fibre optic. I would argue that viral emails are contributing to this problem. They eat up bandwidth in the same way as video downloads albeit to a lesser extent.

By all means send me jokes - I love them - they often make my day; just don't expect me to pass on these chain messages. I won't do it!!