Dear Mom...

You’ll have to forgive us for leaving this one anonymous—but read it all and you’ll understand why. Let’s just say that the fellow who submitted it was kind enough to supply evidence that his tale is terrifyingly true…

I have a website. It has a mixture of stuff on it, mostly out of date, because being a company director I don't often have time to keep it up to date. One day I had just finished a new webpage with my most recent photos and had decided to send the link to interested friends so they could have a look at them (and tell me if any of them were particularly rubbish).

So there I am, going through my address book selecting those people who are good enough friends to be interested, when the phone rings. It's my mother and she's lost the installation disk for her printer. So being the dutiful son, I go to Epson's website, download the drivers for her and attach them to an e-mail to send to her. The phone rings again and it's a customer with a load of questions about his service that if he had read the instructions he would have known all the answers anyway—except he's lost the instructions—again. So I click on "Create Mail" and start a third mail going. I then remember I haven't yet sent the e-mail to my mother so I go back to the other one, add her address to the "To" section and send.

Problem: I have sent her the wrong e-mail. I've sent her the one about the website. Blood running cold time. Mad panic. The reason: I am a transvestite and the new page was of me dressed up as the female me—and she didn't have a clue. OMG! What can I do? I start trying to think of excuses—you can imagine the blind panic. Anyway, five minutes of absolute mayhem ensues, she is almost 70 and would NOT understand, I am close to tears, then suddenly I hear a noise. Incoming mail. I am expecting it to be from her.

Instead, it was: "This is the automated sender verification system at XYZ.com. Your e-mail will held in a queue for 7 days until you verify you are a real person by
clicking on the following link. After that we will assume your e-mail was spam and it will be deleted without being delivered."

Normally I slag off Challenge Response systems (from the antispam point of view)—but in this case—Phew!

Next: School Days, School Daze…

or...