Please stop spreading viruses

I seem to be getting more and more emails that finish off by telling me to send the message on.

I used to get dire warnings of some virus or other that was supposedly wildfire on the Internet. These virus would apparently destroy hard drives and worst of all nobody had a cure for them. The punch line was always "send this to everyone in your address book straight away". In every case the virus was the email itself.

The virus warning mails seem to have died down only to be replaced by ones which claim that passing the message on will bring me good luck or that something amazing will happen on my computer screen. They mostly end up with the emphatic statement, "don't break the chain".

These emails are usually composed in HTML using large brightly coloured lettering and often include animated pictures. Some contain sweet pictures of children or animals in an attempt to increase their appeal. A recent one had twenty eight embedded JPEG images in it.

Many of these emails are heartfelt messages of hope for a better world; an end to war and suffering. A few are fabricated tales of woe. They all have the same aim though which is to appeal to my better self.

More often than not the senders of these messages simply forward them on to me without any editing and so they include all the details of the people who have passed the message on - a bit like an audit trail. It is fascinating to see how many company mail servers each message has passed through!

People used to send chain letters through the post. They had to go to the trouble of copying the letter several times, addressing the envelopes and taking them to the Post Office to buy the stamps. Sending chain letters via email is a much simpler process and best of all cost you nothing. That is why there is such a proliferation of them.

If I followed the instructions and sent each message on to 10 people within the next fifteen minutes and then those people did the same and so on; in one hour I would have generated 1,000 emails. In a day that could become millions - all in pretty colours with little dancing pictures taking up massive amounts of bandwidth.

This may sound callous but I rarely, if ever pass these messages on. Why not, surely they do no harm? Well yes they do actually - they clog up an already heavily congested Internet.

By all means send me the emails if it makes you feel better, just don't expect me to pass them on. What I will pass on though are the brilliant jokes that you post to me but before I do, I'll remove the text formatting, the animated GIFs and most important: the audit trail of how it came to you.