So you’ve just returned from a vacation to Hawaii and the first thing you do when you walk through the door is plop down at your computer to check your email. Here is an email that offers you a great deal on viagra. Here is another email from the President of Nigeria who needs you to send him money in order to get a check for millions of dollars. Oh look, here is a fowarded message from your Aunt Carol. Isn’t Hercules the giant Mastiff cute? You weed through the piles and piles of spam and pick out the funny fowarded messages sent to you by your friends and family. The good messages and the bad spam don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, do they? Well, you’re wrong!

For nearly every piece of spam sitting in your inbox, you can thank your Aunt Carol, or your sister Carolyn, or your brother… uh, Carl. Or you can even blame yourself! You see, when someone forwards you an email message, they are sending you a list of all the people that they sent that message to, yourself included. If you then forward that message to your own friends and family, then you are sending all those name, including yours, to the next group of people, and those names are being added as well. Pretty soon, you’ve got hundreds of names, including those of you and your friends, all in a convienent little email.

Let’s take a look at it mathematically. If you send an email to just 3 people, and each person waits a whole day to send it to 3 more, then 9 people will have received the message by tomorrow. At the end of one week, your message will have reached 6,561 people. After a fortnight (that’s two weeks), it will have reached over 14 million people.

Now let me ask you this, with all of the spam you have sitting in your inbox, what are the odds that at least one out of those 14 million people is the spammer (person who sends spam). Considering all that spam you get in your inbox, the odds are pretty high that your fowarded messages have reach dozens, maybe even hundreds of spammers. And since you are the one who fowarded the message, the spammers know that your email address has a real person checking the mail everyday. Since real email addresses are worth a lot of money in the spam market, your email address will be sold to other spammers who will be kind enough to send you even more spam.

So what can you do about the problem? Well, you could stop fowarding messages, but I know you’re not going to do that. You might ask people to delete your name from the email header before they forward your message along to other people, but you know your friends aren’t going to do that either. So what is the solution? It’s really very simple. Start enjoying that spam! Sign up for free samples of sex enhancing herbs! Tell the President of Nigeria that his Western Union money order is on its way! Learn to love the colorful language used to describe the human body!

Or, you could just stop forwarding emails and save yourself, and your friends, the trouble of a box full of spam everytime they turn on their computer. You could, but you won’t.

At least, this is what the article by the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail would have you believe. Apparently a well-liked teacher at St John’s C of E School in Midsomer Norton, Somerset read a few passages from the end of the final Harry Potter book. These passages were selected by the teacher to be read to her graduating class because she felt the content pertained to her students graduating and moving on with their lives, much like the characters in the book. However some students did not see it this way.

A few students and parents are quoted as being upset by the spoiler, but the real amazement comes not from the fact that the teacher read the end of a popular book, but how Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations reacted to the event. Morrissey said of the teacher that ”it was unforgivable. It’s one of the cruelest things she could have done, even if she didn’t mean it.” Funny, because I can think of hundreds of things more cruel than reading the end of a book to some children, one of which includes trying to ruin a respected teachers career for making a minor, if unimportant mistake.

Margaret Morrissey went on to say that “this act will probably stop all those children [from] reading the book.” Unfortunately for Miss Morrissey, this viewpoint is severely out of touch with reality. Now, few people would deny that reading the end of a book is impolite, but any true fan of the Harry Potter series won’t let a few minor spoilers stop them from reading all 607 pages (759 in the US) of the final installment of their beloved book series.

In light of this being a simple error in judgement, and absolutely no harm was done to these children mentally or physically, I believe it is Miss Morrissey who has done the real harm in this situation. Hopefully Margaret will apologize to the teacher, who I will not name, and the parents and students will go on with their lives instead of feeling like victims of a crime.