The Weekly Round-Up: 06.06.03

Now if you can read this, then your email must be working - which is good, because apparently when our email doesn't work we turn into rage-filled balls of hate.

In fact email deprivation is apparently more stressful than divorce or marriage.

According to research, one in five of us - the one with the shortest of short fuses - goes into a fit of rage instantly if we can't use our email when needed. After five minutes a third of us are on the verge of apoplexy and after half an hour two thirds of us are climbing the walls.

After an hour even the most level-headed of us are fit to burst and 82 per cent of the office will be nearing meltdown.

But spare a thought for the poor IT manager on the receiving end of all this ire. After 24 hours downtime one in five will have cleared their desks and be waiting for the "Brian, can you just pop up to boardroom for a minute" phone call.

So why are we so upset when we lose our email? At least 75 per cent of firms acknowledge that email is a business critical application - which gives you some indication - and then it's worth remembering that some people are just plain bad-tempered and need to calm down a bit.

But is life really any better when your email is working. This week unsolicited email broke through the 50 per cent mark - meaning more email these days is spam than not.

Speaking of which... next week silicon.com is launching a special report all about spam. To kick it off we'd love you to take (literally) 20 seconds, to complete our spam survey.

Still on the subject of spam, BT has been rocked this week by allegations that its own servers are "dangerously misconfigured, insecure or abuseable" and are exposing email users to the threat of increased levels of unsolicited mail.

The problem for BT is that this apparent flaw has seen it blacklisted by DSBL - the Distributed Server Boycott List - which protects people against receiving email from poorly configured servers which could expose them to spam.

Now this can't be good. Certainly not for BT, and certainly not for BT customer Kevin Fiske, who told silicon.com: "This has been going on for about a year now and it is an extreme irritant. It has caused us great embarrassment, particularly with one major client who saw the error notification and assumed we must be blacklisted because we have been spamming people, which obviously isn't the case.

"We continue to see several mails bounce back each week. We are basically stuffed until BT sorts out the problem and gets itself removed from the blacklist."

If you've had the same problem, let us know by emailing editorial@silicon.com. One plus point in all of this is that the noises from within BT Towers suggest this problem may soon be fixed.

Two weeks back the Round-Up brought you news of an Australian man who claimed to have been sacked by text message. After a cursory look back through the record books the Round-Up decided this was probably the first case of its kind.

But not for long.

Last weekend employees of the Accident Group were coming to terms with the fact that their employer had sacked around 2,000 of them by text message, phone call or email.

Nice touch. But let's not feign too much shock here. It's hardly surprising to discover that a company whose business is based on 'ambulance chasing' lacks the human touch when it really matters.

The Round-Up was put in mind of a BBC investigation which exposed the practises of one individual working for the 'no win no claim' specialist. On one occasion he knocked on the doors of houses close to a bus accident asking for volunteers to claim they had been on the bus when it crashed. The same individual was also filmed walking the streets with a potential claimant looking for a loose paving stone or a pot hole over which to stumble.

The Round-Up won't be losing too much sleep about him and his ilk losing their jobs.

In fact the only reason the Round-Up is still losing sleep at all is because of the computer game addiction it admitted to last week.

In response to the Round-Up's confession, and the news that the Round-Up's better half doesn't share this interest, one reader - who didn't ask to be anonymous but we're imposing it upon him for his own sake - wrote in and said:

"Recently I have moved in with my girlfriend. At the time I said to her, 'Look love, I like playing on my PC at night on the odd occasion and it's going to be best if it's in a separate room to the lounge'."

So far his story sounds fair enough, though the Round-Up would like to have seen her face when he began "Look love..." (for the record, the Round-Up thinks somebody's been watching too many episodes of The Sweeney).

But our reader continues: "That's fine she tells me. Three weeks later she walks into the spare room. 'I'm fed up of you being in here, I don't mind you playing on it but I would prefer if you were in the front room so even though you're on this we are still spending time together".

Sound reasonable?

"NO BL00DY WAY," said our reader - who clearly takes computer games very (very) seriously.

"As soon as I bring it in there you'll be complaining that I'm on this and not sitting with you, plus you'll moan about the sound," he continued.

"I promise I won't", said his other half "in her sexy little begging voice" (which was a detail the Round-Up could have lived without).

"Right, fine we'll give it a shot," he told her but ultimately he was proved right.

"Can't you come and sit with me" she began. "The sound's too loud," she continued. "Why do you have to have it so loud?" she went on.

"Women just don't understand," concluded our reader.

The Round-Up is trying to work out what the moral of this story is. Email your suggestions to editorial@silicon.com.

And finally, heavy metal band Metallica put the final nail in the stars and stripes-adorned coffin marked 'irony' this week when they announced they were launching a free download service for fans to access their music online.

On 4 June 2003, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said: "We've always wanted our fans to experience our music online."

Which is odd because on 2 May 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich personally presented Napster with a list of 300,000 users of the peer-to-peer site who were trading the band's music online - and demanded they be stopped from doing so.

What a difference three years makes (when you're an over the hill rock band left to rue the fact that you permanently dented your cool by opposing the one really decent thing on the web... with the obvious exception of silicon.com).