Is e-mail worth the trouble? There are times I wonder. All weekend my mailbox was stuffed with incoming messages of two kinds. The first were bogus security announcements purporting to be from Microsoft. The other were tens -- no, hundreds -- of auto-response messages from various places, saying that my e-mail to someone could not be delivered.

Aggravating? You bet. The supposed Microsoft messages were of course bogus, produced by an e-mail worm known as Swen (also called Gibe.F). The official-looking message announces the availability of a new security patch. And since most users don't know that Microsoft never releases security updates by e-mail, many doubtless clicked through to install the "patch," which turned out to be a virus.

Regular updates of Windows security patches through the real Microsoft site would have prevented any damage. But the collateral issue is the problem: Viruses like this one swipe e-mail addresses from inside the computers they infect. They then send out messages supposedly from those addresses. Your mailbox gets deluged with "failed delivery" messages or in some cases warnings that you have sent a virus, even though you never sent the message in question.

Some recent correspondents have said the solution is to get away from Microsoft altogether. After all, you don't see huge virus attacks on Macs or Linux machines. But that response skirts the real issue. Yes, Microsoft's security has been inadequate for a long time, but the reason Windows is being attacked is that it is the most widely used operating system and therefore the biggest target.

I've been critical of Microsoft for many reasons, but not about this. What Microsoft is dealing with is pure human cussedness, a digital form of vandalism that would be turned on Apple or Red Hat or any other platform that became popular. Because of it, we have to slow our computer performance by adding anti-virus tools and firewalls, making the assumption that to be on the Internet is to be in danger. What a commentary that is on human nature.

No wonder some companies are pondering getting off e-mail altogether. British multi-millionaire John Caldwell has told employees at Phones4U, one of the companies he owns, that they will no longer be allowed to use e-mail internally. Caldwell estimates that the ban will be worth a million dollars a month in saved time to his company.

As in judo, the strengths of e-mail have been turned against it to cause unintended problems. For instance, I've used vacation messages since the 1980s. When people wrote me, they would receive an automated response, telling them when I would be back. But when I went on a short trip recently, I decided against setting such a message up.

Spam has proliferated to the point where most of my automated responses would be going out to spammers, thus confirming to them that they have a live Internet address. And the auto-response loop created by virus-makers would also mean that I would be auto-responding to the "message rejected" messages I was getting because of the Swen virus.

When two auto-response systems encounter each other, the result can be like digital ping-pong. In the worst case, the resulting feedback loop can consume your entire mailbox. Now my vacation message goes out to regular correspondents as a group e-mail, and that's it.

What a shame that a helpful tool has been hijacked, another reminder that the penalties for virus-writing need to be revised. How does the phrase "serious jail time" sound?

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