The Hindu Business Line : Be careful with your Outlook

FOR most of us, the first thing on reaching the desk is to flick on the desktop. Assuming everything goes well inside the box, icons appear on the screen, as if that's Bill Gates' way of telling everybody, "Now, come on, the ball's in your court!"

One tries not to click the Outlook Express icon on the tray, but you know habits are hard to change, and you never know how desperate somebody is trying to reach you through e-mail. But problems start only thereafter in the form of spam, a word for which Word's synonyms don't appear, angry perhaps at unsolicited mail.

Let me see today's sample of spam that have already gone into my `deleted items' folder, waiting to be emptied. `Top quality software' comes first, with special offer of `75 per cent off' for Windows XP, Adobe Photoshop and scores of other packages from alterman.jhgfghd but in between I find `god.jhgfghd' too!

Next is a mail with a mischievous subject, "My boss thinks I'm naughty. He's right', with a whole page of visuals that seem far removed from the work that you have for the day, but you can unsubscribe by clicking http://gonnagonnagetthegrooveon.com/please.

After that is a fervent call from Teleshop: "Become an reseller of the most advance in car entertainment systems and earn $1000's per month or up to 20% on each sales." No, please, but on pops the mail from Melba Stafford saying that a farmer's wife is "never reallllly alone", adopting the same trick that gonnagonna tried on me sometime ago.

I doubt if there's a problem with some keyboards, because there're so many mails with Vicodin spelt with zero for `oh' and one for `i'. Similarly, Cialis and Viagra are spelt with ever so many of letters, reminding one of the frantic efforts of our numerology freaks who add unnecessary characters to advance their luck.

Again, I have stopped complaining about mails that simply read, "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment," because nobody seems to have a clue. Same way with simple lines in the body of the message such as: Important details! Re: your document. Please have a look at the attached file. I saw your photo...

"Choose the Casino you want - or choose both," says a mail from Hollering to whom I'd like to give a holler, "No, stop troubling me!"

From aaron@youngpup.net a mail reads, "You have written a very good text, excellent, good work!" but I know it should be a lie because the faithful InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT has attached a warning that Aaron's message had an attached zip file with PE_FUNLOVE.4099 virus in compressed file data.rtf.scr. To save me, "It has been deleted".

Mails from directors, ministers, presidents and so on from Nigeria, are legion. So are those lottery notifications that one has won millions of dollars. "Don't feel sorry when you read this because everybody has to die one day," is a touching line from too many mails that one stops feeling sorry as a rule.

Don't feel sorry as you read this that there seems to be no hope in the fight against spam. Because last week, Microsoft filed what's seen as "an unusual lawsuit" to battle the spammers by throwing a big spanner in their vile works. To help the giant company, there is a US law called CANSPAM, not meaning you can spam. It stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, and Microsoft has already initiated about a hundred anti-spam legal actions.

According to Aaron Kornblum, an attorney for Microsoft, cited in a news report, the company is trying to change the economics of spam by making it costlier for spammers to continue their activities.

He's not the same Aaron that my firewall stopped, I guess.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in