Another pet peave

I've been online since about 1979. There wasn't an internet back then. We had bulletin board services (BBS) where local computer enthusiasts kept their computers turned on 24/7 and connected to a dial up modem. Dial their number and the machine would answer allowing you to upload or down load files and leave comments on a discussion board. Pretty rudimentary, but it was a new and exiting way to converse with others and exchange idea. Interesting or fun posts where copied and posted on other BBS thus working their way around the country.

Fast forward through the era of Compuserve and AOL to the internet explosion. With it came an email system allowing us to communicate with anyone with an online account. Cheaper than long distance telephone we could keep in touch with friends and family at almost no cost. Easier and faster than snail mail. Better yet you could send to same message to a number of your friends and relatives. What a deal! For the recipient running low on original thoughts to share it was just a matter of forwarding fun or informative stuff one to a new list of contacts. Spam was born. Some of the more popular ones would find its way back to you every so often.

Some individuals who I suspect lacked meaningful goals in their life developed a hobby of creating such spam in the form of chain letters for the sole purpose of seeing how long before it came back. News that the federal income tax is illegal and you don't need to pay it or forty pound New York rats that stole babies from their cribs. Some of these are just tongue-in-cheek fun while others are nothing more than slanderous gossip with harmful intentions. Remember Procter and Gamble having to publicly refute the notion that their logo is in fact a satanic symbol? I personally hate gossip, malicious or otherwise, and refuse to participate. I won't embarrass myself by forwarding this trash to ten of my friends as instructed.

For a long time I simply ignored such alerts as Mars will soon be closer to the Earth than any time in the past 30,000 years or so and appear bigger than the full moon. Lately it's become more of a personal campaign to fight email pollution. I respond to the Forward-button-pusher by gently (or not) pointing out the error of their ways including links to informational sites that logically refute these nonsensical chain letters. As I polish my reputation as a curmudgeon I have started to use the 'reply all' feature to publicly refute and hopefully embarrass the forwarder. Here's why.

The other day I received an informative email from a close friend telling me how I could survive a heart attack with no one around to help. It went on to describe how by coughing energetically during an infarction one can massage the heart enough to keep the blood flowing. The text cited medical establishments that discovered this method, etc. to give it street cred. Coughing CPR! Something everyone over forty should practice, right? I've already had one infarction and this could save my life some day. It was pretty well crafted and almost had me until the last sentence. "BE A FRIEND AND PLEASE SEND THIS ARTICLE TO AS MANY FRIENDS AS POSSIBLE". The tip off. A quick jump to a couple of my favorite web sites, snopes.com and hoax-slayer.com brought me back to reality. Just enough science fact to hook the non-skeptic, but otherwise total B.S. Stuff like this could be dangerous. Sooner or later there will be a spam letter circulating that will contribute to someone's injury or even death. How will the innocent forwarder feel then?

Fighting this junk email is a lonely battle. Would you like to join me? We could start a new grass roots movement.