With another of them, around October of 2003 I concluded that viruses which were being circulated by Internet e-mail could represent a serious threat to the health and lives of people around the world and also governments and the international business community. And I put a fair amount of pressure on the U.S. government directly and through a number of our elected representatives to take specific actions to deal with that threat. The EarthLink Internet server people were also advised to give the matter some thought.

Specifically, I wanted the U.S. government to enact legislation which would encourage or require that major Internet servers operating here in the U.S. add a virus trap option to their customer service packages. And one feature that I thought would be especially useful was an emergency activation mode. You could tell the server not to scan e-mail messages for viruses most of the time. But if one of these major virus outbreaks was detected then the server would automatically begin scanning the e-mail of anyone who had that option activated. And that would help keep the viruses from getting spread around the world by unsuspecting personal computer users.

I believe that there was a strong government response to my recommendations for action. But it did not include legislation to require the addition of those virus scans. However I see that EarthLink has now added a virus scan to their list of customer options. It must be a recent addition. I never saw any announcements about it.

It appears to me to be an almost exact match for what I was recommending to government officials etc. And I am going to assume that it resulted to a large degree from my efforts.

I don’t know how many other Internet servers are now offering that virus scan option. But I am planning to make a strong recommendation to some of our elected government officials that they try to encourage all of the major servers to offer something similar.