Spam, Spam, no thank you, Ma'am

In the last week alone well-meaning 'friends' have seized more than 50MB of my hard disk with viruses that they have unwittingly passed on. These viruses were uninvited.  They weren't the sort that would wipe your C: drive clean or empty your bank account, true, but they behave like viruses because they take up bandwidth, thus clogging up the Internet and slowing it down, and they proliferate exponentially at the speed of light.


The villains are most girlie net-virgins who just reely reely have to pass on to their entire address book the latest bit of round-robin feel-good or feel-guilty drivel that tickled them.


I've tried everything.  I've done polite replies asking them not to include me in the list of recipients for the latest version of frog in a blender or why immigrants are bleeding the country dry.  I've tried suggesting to them that some of this stuff actually breaks the law because it tends to incite racial hatred.  I've tried subtlety - saying 'oh gosh! How amusing! I really must pass your hilarious antisemitic joke and 10MB of jpgs on to some of my Jewish friends.'  Nothing works.


There are two last resorts.  The obvious one is to block them so that I will never receive anything from them again, but this way lies social fragmentation and no Christmas cards, ever.  And nobody would ever speak to anybody else ever again.  The other is to send them a bill.  What we need is a net-clamping agency.  £100 to unlock your e-mail account for abuse of the privilege of free speech, and don't do it again.


Meanwhile, I will once again spend a couple of hours cleaning out all the uninvited hi-res jpgs from the dark corners of the hard disk, where they lurk.  What I can't do is clean out of the heads of the people who send this sad stuff to me their opinion of me - they think I think the same way as them. 


And I rather hope that I don't.