I'm not exactly a happy camper at the moment. I've wasted hours today dealing with spam emails, and then with incoming viruses.

All the spams were addressed to me, variously, and I took the step of "retiring" some of the afflicted email addresses just to cut down future junk. There were a total of five spams that came in during the course of the day, plus at least one other that tried to get in but was foiled by the MAPS Relay Spam Stopper. Two of the spams were the same "how to make money on the Internet" chain letter, complete with the snail-mail addresses of the twits who figure it just might work. It's probably a good thing that none of them are in my vicinity so far, or I might be tempted to do something unpleasant to them.

Then there were the viruses. They were all instances of the one that has the subject line, "Snowhite and the Seven Dwarfs - The REAL story!". Five of these little buggers have been emailed into my system in the last five days. None of them were sent to me, but they all came into my system to be delivered to my customers, and my customers are basically my friends. When a friend's computer gets infected by a virus, it usually falls to me to fix it, and this usually means nuking the system down to naked hard disk, then reinstalling Windows and everything else. So far I haven't actually charged anyone money for this irksome task, but a few people owe me some serious favours and/or pizzas.

But even if these viruses don't wind up infecting anyone (and they probably won't, because I took the liberty of renaming the extensions on the attachments when I found them), they've still cost me money and time. Time, obviously, because I had to rename attachments, warn recipients, and attempt to track down the owner of the infected computer by picking through mail logs. I could have just ignored them, but only at the risk of people actually opening the damn things, or the infected computer continuing to spread the pox, thus potentially creating more onerous work for myself and others like me later. The money side of the thing is more direct: I'm billed by the megabyte for incoming data, and these viruses are 32k of incoming data each. Granted, the expense is unlikely to ruin me, but I deeply resent paying for junk mail and viruses.

Necessity is a mother, and if this crap continues to get worse, it will be necessary for me to write a new mail protocol: one that is more robust to the task of combatting viruses and spam, and which contains such nice concepts as Encryption and Authentication. I would then go on a mission to persuade ISPs everywhere that this is a Good Thing, and that they will provide their customers with a better service by using it, as well as reduce their own spam-combatting costs.

Feel free to scoff at my pretensions if you like, but if these email nasties continue to increase, I'm going to lose my grip on reality enough to think that it's worth trying.