Junking mail
Onliners reading the story of the Oxford student whose deleted emails were read by police (Guardian, July 6, page 2) may wonder about their own emails, and how to delete them totally.

Details vary with email client, but to take Outlook Express 5 as an example (the most popular - because it is free with Windows 98): When you delete an email, it goes into Deleted items. Recovery is trivial.

Delete an email from Deleted items (or use Shift-delete to bypass Deleted items), and it seems to disappear. However, it remains in the file Deleted Items.dbx buried deep in your folder structure.

Subsequent deleted emails may eventually overwrite it, but this could take some time, or never happen. Recovery of the deleted email is still very easy.

To clean up this file, open Outlook Express, and click File, Folder then Compact All Folders. Wait. It could take a few minutes. If you get a "folder in use" error, close Outlook Express, reboot, and try again.

Recovery of your deleted email is now much harder, but still feasible for quite a while until those disk sectors are overwritten.

To accelerate this, load your Windows CD-rom, make a temporary folder on your hard drive, and drag and drop the entire contents of the CD-rom into the temporary folder. Wait. When this finishes, delete the temporary folder and its contents.

Then empty the Recycle bin.

Then open (all at the same time) all the normal programs you use. Close them all again. Reboot, and defrag your hard drive. This overwrites most deleted file fragments and the swap file contents.

Now, only military intelligence will be able to read your deleted emails. To stop this, remove your hard drive, and place it on a hot bonfire until it reaches bright red heat for at least 10 minutes. You are now safe.

Except for the records the government will soon force all ISPs to keep about your emails, which will still be available. However, look on the bright side; when you email your friends, it's one time the government will be listening to you.
William Allen
mail@mayfly13.fsnet.co.uk

Call costs
The initiative by Mint Telecom (Online, July 6) to cut GSM call costs abroad is excellent. But why should it be necessary?

Why does it cost me £2.15 a minute to call my UK Demon mailbox from the US? After all, mobile call prices in both countries have tumbled recently and you can phone transatlantic from fixed lines for just pennies a minute.

Is there any sound reason for these excessive GSM rates or are they simply what the market will stand?
David Last
jdl@navaid.demon.co.uk

Crying foul
Fascinating, isn't it, the way the commercial mind works? First we have the "music industry" belly-aching about MP3 and Napster (etc) "piracy" with never a word about the decades of their piracy, ripping us off with grossly inflated record prices.

Now we get commercial "internet publishers" moaning about "unfair" competition from the BBC (Online, July 6).

Well, just how many commercial web operators have volunteered to contribute even as little as one-tenth of one per cent of their web-generated revenues to help fund the particle physics community which spun the web in the first place?

And, please, no guff about how much commerce has contributed to improving the web. I don't see what "improvement" there is when we now regularly have to hang around while the ads download!
David Lewin
d.lewin@rl.ac.uk

I'm delighted to hear that the BBC is so successful on the net - just the kind of thing that I pay my licence fee for. And anyway, I thought that excellence was the name of the game.

Do we cry foul because Venus Williams is coached by her father, and has her sister for constant practice? I think not. If the BBC's competitors cannot come up to the mark, they should quit and do something else.

Better than that, they should learn from the example, and then diversify.
Peter Hart
peter@searlecamb.demon. co.uk

Stay mutual
Re Demutalising the internet (Online, July 6). It was an interesting article, but I think some of the fears will not be realised.

Undoubtedly, corporations would love a stake in "controlling" the internet, but I don't expect it to happen. The standards for communicating on the internet cannot easily be changed, because the internet is already there. For anything new added to the internet to be any use, it must be compatible with the existing protocols.

True, the standards have changed over the years. Microsoft added "extensions" to HTML (hypertext mark-up language) which now seem to have become standard. Also, Java appeared a little while after the advent of the web.

But these changes have not affected the uses that the internet can be put to.

This is the important point: no one can "take over" the web in the way that a business can take over a street, or a town. No matter how many web pages your organisation has, you are still just as small as somebody's personal one-page website.

As long as a website is not being viewed, it might as well not be there.

So, come on any corporation thinking it is hard enough to steal the web from us - have a try! It can't be done, because the web is established. It will only get bigger.
Richard Wild
richard_wild@nsb.co.uk

Outnumbered
So 12.3 trillion x 8 = 1 trillion, then? It seems the government's numeracy hour was introduced just a little too late for poor Neil McIntosh.

Still, it was probably as a result of his mind being overboggled at the concept of trillions per second.
Tom Paternoster
tom@ashley-pub.com

Online replies: Quite. We should have said the scientists were aiming for computers running at 100 trillion operations a second.