OK – before I start – this is one of my random rants posts. I believe in looking at the positives  life… but this is one of those occasions where I can’t find anything but negatives.

In the past 24 hours I have received the same e-mail from 2 trusted and very dear friends. It appears to offer a spending reward from a major UK store in return for sending it on to 20 others in my address book.

Of course – if it seems to be too good to be true – then it usually is.

In this case – if I do the simple maths – just taking the people that those 2 e-mails and the one that my daughter also received into the equation will cost the company around £4,000,000 to “reward”. Spot the flaw?

Now for me this is the most despicable of the scam/hoax stuff. The warnings type – tell all of your friends that if you touch this e-mail your hard drive will implode – seems to be less popular and maybe more people are wise to them. But this one plays on us being kind hearted – we may gain something and we would like our friends to do so too. I expect that anyone who has forwarded it chose those they sent it to carefully.

What goes on in the minds of the people who start these off? In this case I can’t see anything obviously malicious ( though there may well be ) apart from including an e-mail address of some poor bloke whose inbox must be closed down by now . But then he might be the very person who is harnessing all of these e-mail addresses for his own spam purposes. Who knows? I doubt we will ever be able to tell.

There now – rant over – off to think positive thoughts for the rest of the day.

Reminds me of “How Full is my Bucket”. www.thebucketbook.com. Too much dipping in my bucket so far this morning!