Chain Letters Are Worse Than Viruses

Yesterday I got once again a Chain Letter. In case you don't know - I HATE CHAIN LETTERS!!!

This time, it was a pseudo virus alert. When I complained with the sender, urging her to stop sending me chain letters, she said: "But it's a VIRUS alert! I can't take the chance you'll miss it!"

What people don't understand, is that if 50% of the users would think like this sender, there would be no Internet. Nada, zip, nil, rien du tout, nothing, niets, kadachat...

Just do the math:

Let's assume 50% of the people believe in those nonsense and send such a virus alert to 20 other people.

Now assume it takes on average 5 minutes from the moment you get the email until you forward it (some a little more, some a little less).

In this worst case scenario, we flood the Net with 10^12 emails after 1 hour. Keeping the 5-minute window I assumed above, it's more than 3 BILLION emails per second. No need to calculate how many emails would be sent after 2 hours - there would be no Internet by then.

Fortunately for the Internet, most users know better than to forward Chain Letters...

Spam the spammer!!!

I just got a spam mail that made me REALLY angry.

It's from a company that calls itself Mailmedia. The message itself, however, was sent by a user at the lombardisoftware.com domain (I'm pretty sure that the genuine Lombardi company has nothing to do with this...).

What upset me the most with this mail, was the nerve - it was no less than a promotion for businesses to use their services to send spam mails. Yes, that's right - I got a spam mail that is a promotion for a spam company!

But that means that there should be some way to communicate with them, right? Unfortunately, there is no website, or email address - I would have been more than happy to spend a few hours setting up my own spamming machine to kill their website or their email address. I would, really! But they weren't that stupid - they only provided an Israeli mobile phone number:

050-5281978

(Note, I've searched this phone number up in Google and found only one entry in a Gays forum. This guy seems to be searching for a fatherly type... I have no idea whether this is genuine, or just another frustrated spamee who wants payback.)

Now, my request to every Israeli reading this post - please please please - spam this phone number with as many calls as you can. Let them FEEL how annoying it is to be spammed all day long. Let them LOOSE potential clients because the line will always be busy. Make them SUFFER as much as we do from their never ending spam mails.

Be smart: don't forget to HIDE the calling number when you call them (for Orange you must preceed the number with #31#, for HOT you must preceed with *43).

DISCLAIMER: Although I really want as many people to join the spammers spamming effort as possible, I take no responsibility whatsoever to any miscomfort, legal or other issues you may encounter as a result of doing as I just asked.

Yahoo! Mail to become unlimited in size?

According to YNET, Yahoo! announced that as of May 2007 they will gradually update all Yahoo! Mail accounts to unlimited mailbox sizes. I couldn't find any additional source mentioning this, but I trust YNET didn't make this up.

This isn't surprising, of course. Ever since Google introduced GMail it was obvious that at some point they would announce that the mailbox size has become unlimited. Maybe the surprising thing is that the first company to come with such an announcement is Yahoo!, who's been lagging behind Google with most of the previous advances.

This is, of course, a very welcome announcement, hopefullly to be followed by all the other main webmail suppliers.

Cool!

P.S: I think that with this new development, it's time that the ISP's decide whether they want to continue supplying email services to their customers. If they do - then they should dramatically improve the level of their service (speed and mailbox size). Otherwise, they're really making fools of themselves.