thoughts about living in the email era

Thoughts about living in the E-mail era

By David Verveer

The first thing I do every morning is to read, or actually to brows the numerous E-mails which arrived during the night to all three of my e-mail boxes. You will ask, why three different e-mails, isn’t one enough. I have several answers to this question, first of all, originally my “hotmail” was for business, my “g-mail” for correspondence with family and friends and the “yahoo-mail” for contact with my daughters, but during the years, these purposes got rather mixed up, and I use the email addresses at random.

All three of them have very effective spam filters, which puts messages for supply of “Viagra” and other chemicals for better sex life in the spam box, including friendly suggestions, how to enlarge my private parts, show me nude photographs of famous pop-stars, and to improve my performance in bed. I don’t belief that this kind of e-mails are actually effective, but receiving my e-mail addresses are caused by my good friends, who are stupid enough to fall in the trap of chain mails.

A chain mail is a letter which ends with the request to forward this letter to 7 to 10 friends. The contents of the letter deals mainly with a poor dying person (generally a child) whose illness is killing him, and reporting his sad story to as many as possible people, worldwide will give him the satisfaction, not to die in vain, (it might be that I did not read the tragedies correctly), but as I know for a fact that those chain letters serve the spammers in collecting addresses, I never agree to continue the chain. This chain letter technology is old and pre-internet, you will remember receiving a letter, warning you that if you don’t send it to at least 10 people, you will have an accident or something sad will happen. I never understood the stupidity of people continuing these chains, how many times can you read about this poor kid going to die, before you understand that they are using you, but enough about this.

Another email (also dating from pre-internet times) is from widows or sons of deceased African leaders, who want to give us 30,000 dollars, (or more) if we provide them with my bank account’ details. Of course, I never answered these letters, and always understood that this was a trick, but never understood how this works, until a friend of mine explained, that if you answer positively on such letters, they tell you, that in order to make the transfer, they need a small sum to cover legal paper work, of say 500 dollars, to show the corresponding bank, that you are a legal entity. And if you are so stupid to fall for that, you contributed your money to a group of crooks, without of course, getting a penny back.

Then you have emails from friends with jokes, these I open, and if I consider them somehow funny, I send them on to others, even though; it might be another type of chain letter.

Then there is a steady quantity of spam, from people I don’t know, or / and in languages I don’t speak, which I automatically erase. Last week, I received a chain letter from a friend of mine, which of course I erased immediately, but alas too late, because the following day, I received more than 50 messages in Japanese, I wonder what they tried to sell to me, an inflatable geisha?

Another 30% of my emails are news flashes from the various news papers, with breaking news, such as, who is the legal father of a glamour girl, who died because an overdose of something, and the governor of California has a broken leg, Bush’s popularity is now around the 4% or the World is warming up, due to irresponsible use of private transport.

Interesting are the newsletters dealing with the various new computer technologies, talking about ipod, blogs, Voip, Vista, Linux, etc., which makes me realize that I am getting old, because most of these phrases and names, do not apply to me, and I have no notion where they are talking about, it reminds me that when I bought my first computer, small boys in the computer shop showed me how to operated it, I thought if so young they know how to do it, I will not have any problems, how mistaken I was. Today, my grandson organizes my mobile phone and tells me, how to operate the computer.

Coming back to my emails, sometimes I get also a welcome letter from friends and family, but those are rarities and represent only around 5% of the total amount of my mail, but in order to get those, I am prepared to suffer the other 95% of trash.

I wonder what I actually did before the Internet started to influence my life, must have been boring, but on the other hand, when I was a child, the radio had only one station and broadcasted a few hours everyday, the television had not yet arrived and in order to phone, you had to find a public phone, as getting a phone at home, required a huge sum and a waiting list of more than two years, still with the help of newspapers, books and libraries, we managed to occupy ourselves. I know we can not go back and give up all the technologies of today, but I wonder, did they make our life better?