The cherry is red
The berry is black
Get one in your hand
And the bank account goes FACK

I’ve written in the past about unwanted email forwards and how they are more hilarious than irritating. Recently I received an email about ‘Do not open this mail, it contains a dangerous virus.’ The one thing that comes to my mind is that people who actually need such instructions would have already opened such mails and downloaded the virus, and people who do not need such warnings would be well off even without the forwards.

The surprising thing about email forwards is that no one is immune to sending them, even if the person has decades of experience in an IT company. Indeed most of the forwards are sent by techies having nothing better to do than to keep checking their inbox every 10 minutes. If only they would be so proactive in their coding.

The logic used by the people who chain-forward is that it is better to be safe than sorry, or why take chances when it is free of cost. Agreed, that forwarding an email doesn’t cost a dime, but no one keeps track of the time wasted on forwards and checking such emails. But the problem is that people (at least here in India) are gullible about most things on the Internet and most of them fail to do a simple background check before clicking that Forward button and spamming contacts with unwanted emails. Combine that by inserting a religious theme – Lord Ganesha will be furious, or Shani maharaj will do unwanted stuff to you in the future etc. and you have all the elements of a blockbuster chain email. I have yet to see what the situation is in more ‘developed’ countries. Still I’ve seen such chain messages even in YouTube comments so I’m not too confident about the situation being otherwise there too.

I divide email forwards into three categories:-

1) Totally useless/harmful – These are the kind of mails which do not provide any value add whatsoever. Most of them include a scary warning about relatives dying, or god cursing the receiver of the email if he or she doesn’t forward the email to 25 people in the next 4 hours or so.

2) Well intentioned but inaccurate – Out of the three types, these seem to be the largest group of email forwards which make the rounds. They consist of a seemingly useful piece of information which has been twisted, turned, exaggerated to make it seem more dangerous and urgent to act upon. Most of the time, it is all the handiwork of an idle person. These would include the rumours of plastics in Kurkure (read the clarification here), or the Coke-mentos story. Probably the Kurkure email was started by some over enthusiastic parent wanting to dissuade children from eating junk food. One of the most famous series of this category is the ones where Microsoft or Yahoo claims to donate 1$ every time a particular email is forwarded. Agreed, Bill Gates is philantrophic but if he decides to donate his money based on chain emails, his net worth would plummet to zero before you can say sub-prime.

3) Useful forwards - These are the very rare emails which pop up in your inbox once in a blue moon. One such example I saw was the ICE campaign where people were encouraged to store a particular contact number under the universal name ICE (In Case of Emergency). If nothing else, this could prove useful at times. Another types would include email forwards exhorting people to vote etc. But such forwards are very rare and you would consider yourself lucky if your contacts send you forwards of this category more than others.

I’ve purposely excluded spam mails from this classification because they are sent directly by the spammers and to a certain extent you can block them from sending such mails again. Email forwards on the other hand are sent by people in your contact books and there is no foolproof way to block such emails from them without affecting the flow of normal mails (if they send any)

All in all, chain mails are a source of humour for me and a quick test of the sender’s intelligence and common sense. Previously I used to reply to such mails and indirectly let the sender know that all he is doing is clogging other people’s inbox. But I realized that this won’t stop people from sending chain mails anyway, so why try. Now I just smile and delete such emails while praying for the sender to get some more self-control in sending such mails.

PS. Forward this link to 25 people in the next 30 minutes or else the following will happen:-

1) The ghost of the sub-prime crisis will haunt you forever

2) Your gmail account will be deleted as Google’s servers are getting very slow

3) There will be an attack of aliens from outerspace who will get into your brain and eat all your grey matter (if they find any left).

4) North Korea will attack South Korea which will prove to be the precursor to WW III.

Useful links

• Snopes – Rumour checker
• Using gmail to fight chain mails

Not for the faint hearted.

A little cleaning behind the ears

Yes, it still works!

Many ISPs have ‘freakingly frustrating’ schemes where the happy hours (free downloads) are in the dead of the night. You have two choices – either you can stay up all night to download your favourite stuff and go to work looking like a zombie or you can teach your computer to do all the work for you. Here are a few tips which will help you schedule your downloads in the night and let you catch up on much required sleep:-

1) Setting your DSL router in Bridge mode – If you have an DSL line, your router can be configured as ‘always on’ or in ‘bridge mode’. Putting your DSL router in bridge mode lets you use the broadband connection as a dial-up one. This means you do not have to keep it logged on always and thus save whatever little bandwidth you can by those random pings and background processes. an optional step. Also since using bridge mode, you connect only when you want to, thus safeguarding your computer from outside access. Bridge mode or no bridge mode, you should always use a personal firewall to protect your computer. To setup your DSL modem to bridge mode, first follow this and then create a new PPPoE connection (Here’s a tutorial to turn it back to auto-dial). To schedule this new connection to be dialed automatically, see this tutorial in conjunction with the Task Scheduler tutorial given below.

2) Rapidshare and other file uploading sites – If you use Rapidshare or other file uploading services and if you do not have a premium account, it can be really frustrating to deal with the file download restrictions. There is a solution. Sites such as Ibiet & Rapidcat convert the free links to premium links thus letting you download more than one file at a time. This is made possible by the premium accounts donated by users. Paste the free Rapidshare link in the textbox and get the premium link. Copy the premium link in your favourite download manager and schedule it (tutorial given below) to run during the happy hours. One problem is that there are thousands of users using these sites. So the accounts which are donated run out of bandwidth quickly. Keep checking the site regularly. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch the site when it still has a few accounts active.

2) Download streaming videos – If you prefer to watch videos after downloading them rather then watch them on sites such as YouTube or Google Video, you can download these videos all at a time. If you use the Firefox browser, download the DownloadHelper extension which will provide you with the download link for the video. For those not using Firefox, try this YouTube downloader. Just paste the URL of the video which you’re watching and it will provide the download link. Copy this download link in your download manager and schedule it.

3) Use bittorrent – I could rave and rave about bittorrent but let me just provide this link for a quick tutorial of how bittorrent works. Some bittorent clients have a scheduler built-in using which you can restrict your downloads/uploads only during your free hours. Using this in conjunction with Windows Scheduled Tasks, you can fire up the client at the start of your happy hours and then shut it down when the happy hours are over. Just remember, the bittorent technology is legal. What you download from it may not be.

4) RSS feeds - If you like to read blogs/news through RSS feeds, you can schedule your RSS client to download the feeds during the happy hours, thus presenting you with all the fresh news and blog posts when you wake up in the morning. More of how to schedule using Windows Scheduled Tasks next.

5) Windows Task Scheduler – This is one of the most underused utilities in Windows. By using this program you can schedule any program to start up at any time you wish. Depending on your computer’s BIOS, you can even start the computer from sleep/hibernate mode.
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