The other day the young man who runs the computers around here made the bold statement that at least presently the computer virus protection people were ahead of the virus people. As the “governator” would say, “Big mistake.” He made the statement on Tuesday morning and by Tuesday afternoon I had received 173 emails. One-hundred seventy-eight actually came if you count the five Norton deleted before they even got into my mailbox.

Only three of the emails were legitimate messages I wanted to read. Twelve of them were double-dot Zip files, an oldie but goodie where you put two extensions on a file. One of the extensions is harmless, .TIF for example. The other is .ZIP, and when your computer tries to unzip the file, it opens Pandora’s Box. Your only hope is to delete the .ZIP files unopened. Don’t send me any legitimate .ZIP files because we delete those as soon as we see them. The same is true for .EXE files – we just trash them out of hand too. If I don’t recognize your email address, out you go. If your subject line contains any non-alphanumeric characters, it’s the deep six for you. If you’re still around after all of that, I don’t open your email if the subject line doesn’t tell me you have something to say that I want to hear. It’s too dangerous to open “junk” email, so don’t send me any frivolous or junk email.

In fact, don’t send me any emails at all. If what you have to say isn’t worth 37 cents out of your pocket to send, then it is worse than worthless to me. We are dumping our email. It just plain costs too much for the benefits, such as they are. We each spend at least 20 minutes a day sorting through email. At $10 an hour (starvation wages) that amounts with employee taxes to about $3.50 a day out of my pocket for each employee. On average each of us receives about five business messages that are meaningful to the business each day. Your “free” message costs me 70 cents. Not anymore.

That cost benefit analysis doesn’t even count the potential cost of a virus trashing, say, all our accounting data or the work we’ve put into the word processor files we need to put out for our next magazine or the certain cost for software, updates and lost time while we scan our computers with Norton, AdAware and Spybot.

My computer guru tells me that the worst is yet to come. So far we have been safe if we didn’t take some action that allowed the worm, virus or whatever to get control of the address pointer in the microprocessor, but the hackers are working on it and many computer wizards are convinced that the self-activating evil spirit is just around the corner. You won’t have to open it. The process of accessing your email from your server will allow the hijacking of control to your computer and executing the invading program.

Who are these people that send pernicious emails? What is their motivation? They remind me of the kids who stand on a bridge over the freeway and drop boulders on cars passing below. Talk about evil existing. You bet your job and your livelihood evil exists, and it comes in the form of hackers or whatever these denizens of the bottom of the cesspool call themselves nowadays.

Just for fun do the same cost analysis as I just did at the place where you work. You didn’t know that your friendly local hacker was costing you that much, did you? It makes the cost of electromagnetic interference pale by comparison.

In fact, it would be cheaper and probably more effective if we all went back to the post offices. I’m not against progress but I am against stupidity, inefficiency and expense involved in replacing one system with a more modern and fashionable system that doesn’t work. In the days when we sent letters and received promotional fliers by mail the messages we sent (envelope, stamp and stationery) cost us less in actual dollars out of pocket than the “free” email costs us now.