h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can't recall ever receiving a letter
or package that destroyed (or threatened
to destroy) my mailbox and/or personal
possessions. I receive a lot of junk mail,
of course, but the only costs that I incur
because of it are those related to buying
trash bags to put the stuff in and haul it
to the dumpster.

Email has been more costly, and more threatening.
In the last month, my anti-virus software has
alerted me to around ten virus-bearing emails.
Had I not had the software, who knows whether
my computer would even still be running now?
Would I be looking at thousands of dollars to
buy a new computer, or hundreds of dollars to rehabilitate
the existing one?

I have had to go out and buy yet more anti-virus
software so I could be protected against the
new viruses that keep getting created.

I understand that snail-mail has security problems
of its own, problems for which the U.S. Postal
service is held resposible. Part of the money that
I pay for postage goes to pay for this security.

So, I suppose it's a wash in some ways. It's faster
and easier to dispose of email junk mail than
snail-mail junk mail. Somehow, though, the sheer
ease (and low expense) with which the email
junk-mailers can send their emails guarantees
that this form of junk mail will eventually
become a much bigger problem for society than the
snail-mail junk mail. Plus, the emailers
have mostly not done their homework in terms of figuring
out what products or services I might be
interested in receiving. My snail-mail junk mail
often includes circulars from stores and/or
supermarkets that I patronize regularly. I don't
mind receiving them.

ya Virus bearing e-mails are the flaw in e-mail, but it's only a threat if you're not careful. Besides it's hard to block real world spam, e-mail spam is really easy.

I think you're exaggerating a bit and also being very paranoid. The only way that your computer can be harmed by something you receive in an email is if *you* execute the attached file, script or whatever.

Hopefully, no-one in their right mind would look twice at an e-mail from an unknown address, especially one with attachments. The only reason there's been a huge worry about the threat of "e-mail virii" is because of versions of Outlook that had various security flaws such as a security hole involving the preview-pain, whereby a virus could auto-excute itself, exploits to do with Word Macros in e-mails being allowed to do what they like and so on. Most of these e-mail virii are really basic because they exploit very basic holes that shouldn't be there in the first place. Linux and Mac users are constantly bombarded with these e-mails that do nothing more than use up disk space. There really isn't that big a risk at all.

If you haven't already, try going to windowsupdate.com and make sure everything is patched and upto date. If you're not even using a version of Windows then I don't know what you're worrying about.