Read this now - or a virus will eat your hard drive.(News)

Byline: Burt Constable

This column should be required reading for every human who uses a computer. But if you e-mail it to everyone you know and ask them to do likewise, you missed the point.

Chain letter e-mails usually are annoying, sometimes illegal and cost us millions of dollars a day.

Take that "Gas Prices" e-mail urging a boycott of two brand-name gas stations until the price of a gallon of gas falls. Judging from copies I have received this month, it simply is an updated version of the one-day gas boycott e-mail I received several copies of last year.

The new gas boycott e-mail shares a characteristic with other e- mails warning me about deadly spiders on the loose, or hypodermic needles in children's ball fields, or victims missing kidneys left in bathtubs full of ice, or my deodorant causing cancer, or new e- mail taxes, or e-mail petitions, or Disney offering free trips, or Bill Gates offering free money, or the sad story about the 2-year- old vacationing in Mexico who was murdered, hollowed out and stuffed with cocaine by ruthless drug smugglers.

They are not legit.

The latest gas boycott memo features the name and phone number of a government official in Michigan. Call the number and you will hear a recorded message explaining how that poor woman's "signature file was copied to this e-mail without her knowledge or consent." Track down the poor woman at her new number and you will hear her say, "I don't have time to answer questions about this hoax. I have to get some work done."

While that fraudulent e-mail forced her to get a new phone number and explain her story countless times to strangers and news reporters, it also is bad news for the rest of us.

If everyone on the Internet takes the time to call up that message at work, it costs our economy $41.7 million in wasted time, figures William Orvus, senior security specialist for the Computer Incident Advisory Center, a service of the U.S. Department of Energy.

And that's just the cost of opening one unnecessary e-mail.

"All of us receive a whole lot more than one," says Orvus, whose department spends much more time debunking hoaxes than it does on real computer viruses.

E-mail is so easy and so free.

"It's not like the old chain letters where you had to type a letter, put it in an envelope and put on a stamp," Orvus says. Instead, a few quick keystrokes, and you can forward it to everyone you know.

Even if you send an e-mail to only 10 people and those 10 people send it to only 10 people, the message will reach 1 million people by the e-mail's sixth generation.

While it is against the law to use your e-mail to defraud people, most of the electronic chain-letter creators "are just out there seeing how far it will go," Orvus says. One school teacher and her class unleashed a chain e-mail to see how far it would go. It included a "stop date" when the project was over.

"I received copies of that thing six months after that," Orvus notes. "So people weren't reading it. They were just passing it on."

The same thing may happen with the prayer chain letter asking me to pray for an injured boy in Wheaton. We had no news story about his accident, and I couldn't find the boy or his parents in any phone directory. Even if he does exist, I don't understand the point of getting many strangers to pray for the boy. If God's mysterious master plan calls for the kid to die, will God change his mind if the prayer tote board tops a million?

Maybe the boy has recovered. Maybe he's dead. But his e-mail is timeless.

"Thirty years from now, you'll still be getting it," Orvus warns.

Even well-intentioned, true e-mails can be misguided. In one case of e-mail abuse, a frantic relative of a missing child immediately sent out an e-mail with the child's photo and instructions to spread the word.

"The child was found at a neighbor's, watching TV," Orvus says. Meanwhile, that e-mail has been spotted in Russia, China and Afghanistan and is still going strong.

You can go to the Web site http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org and see all the hoaxes, scams and flubs for yourself. Or you can sit back and wait for them to arrive via e-mail.