99 YEARS OLD AND STILL SPLUTTERING AT SPAM...

THE time I have to spend deleting emails every morning seems to be growing and growing. It would help, at this time of year, if I had an efficient spam filter that automatically deleted any message including the words Christmas, festive or gift. To give it something to do for the rest of the year, I would also include vegetarian and any message with the words food and healthy in the same sentence.

Some years ago, I did a calculation based on figures for the growth of email traffic worldwide since the very first email was sent in the Seventies.

By extrapolating the figures for the number of emails, the percentage that were unsolicited and unwanted spam and human population growth, I was able to calculate when the entire lives of the working population of the whole world would be taken up deleting emails.

According to my calculations, we had about a century left before that happened but more recent figures have shown a slowing of the rate of growth in emails and a lessening of the proportion that are spam.

This gives us a breathing space and I think I have found a way of utilising it to solve some important problems.

At present, there are about 205 billion emails sent every day. Of those, around 61 per cent are spam. That figure is down from a high of more than 90 per cent in 2008 but even with the current low figure that leaves more than 125 billion spam emails a day demanding deletion.

Now, even when the computer is cooperating with one’s key presses, it takes an average of at least two seconds to delete an email. So deleting 125 billion emails takes 250 billion seconds which is almost 70 million hours.

We must ask ourselves how many people’s working lives is this? Working 40 hours a week with five weeks’ holiday a year, there are 1,880 working hours in a year, which is an average of 1,880/365 working hours a day which is about five hours. So the 70 million hours we need to delete all the spam would take up the entire working time of 14 million people.

There are currently around 1.66 million unemployed people in the UK. By creating the job of Email Deleter, we could immediately provide work for all of those, with enough work left over for another 12.4 million people. According to the latest figures, there are currently 20.4 million people out of work in the EU. If we subtract the UK figure of 1.66 million, we are left with 18.74 million in need of jobs.

At a stroke, we could employ more than two thirds of them as Email Deletion operatives, even after restoring the UK to full employment. Best of all, they would not have to come to Britain to do the jobs as emailing is a global phenomenon and spam can be deleted from the comfort of one’s own PC. The EU insistence on free movement of people would thus become obsolete.

And best of all, I would no longer be bothered by unwanted emails about Christmas festivities.

A happy humbug to you all.