The internet police are on my trail for a terrible crime I didn't commit.(Letters)

Byline: MIKELOFTUS

Excuse me if I come across a bit edgy at the moment. The fact is I have just had my collar felt by the internet police.

Like many a generally upright citizen any encounter with the boys in blue can leave me just a bit nonplussed - and the internet police (the boys in electric blue?) do that with knobs on. You never knew about the internet police? My friend, I've just been blacklisted by them.

Blacklisted! All a bit 1984 plus a touch of Franz Kafka and just a dash of simple, homespun, nightmare.

Lets begin at the beginning. Of course, I get email messages returned undelivered.

With my enthusiastic but less than accurate keyboard skills its more of a miracle that anything actually ever goes through. I spend a lot of time resending - if they still don't go my usual conclusion is to suspect a fault at the other end and try to remember to have another try later.

Then a couple of months ago an email is returned (from the University of Birmingham - to which I am eternally grateful) that along with some usual jumble of code ( which I had seen on a few other returns) also told me in much plainer English that I was on their blackist as a spammer. Which I am not. Thankfully it also explained how I might get off the hook - by fessing up to the internet police.

And thereby I learned enough about some of the darker intricacies of the internet to earn my very own quilted anorak.

First of all - and I think I knew this - as far as the internet is concerned my carefully crafted, poetically perfect, email address is a dull old string of numbers (the IP address). My internet address 'lives' on a server - in Chicago as it happens. The folk in Chicago sell the server space on at least twice before I do a deal to hire it.

But while I thought that I was the only tenant at my very own shiny palace with its IP address, I find that in fact is more a house in very, very multiple occupation and I am - like - sleeping on the sofa of a friend of friend. Because dozens of people might share a single IP address.

Now enter the boys in electric blue (from California, of course). Their job - which all decent folk applaud - is to stop the net being ground to a halt with spam. Basically they shut the spammer down by putting the offending IP on a blacklist and then systems simply refuses to accept their email. Which is what has happened to me. (Anguished whimper from the cells "I never done nuffink, guv'nor").

But given the multi-occupancy issue it's as if the police (the real ones, this time) respond to a complaint about a noisy party by shutting off the power to the entire house leaving the innocent lodger on the sofa in the cold and the dark too.

So I go to the electric boys in blue with my concern and they shake their head firmly but sternly and say not our problem, sonny Jim - take it up with the landlord. He has to stop the noisy parties.

But the guy in Chicago says it's nothing to do with him, the guys I pay my rent to say no one has complained to us and the guys in the middle seem very co-operative but never actually do anything.

I spin around this loop for a couple of frustrating and fraught weeks. Increasingly my real dread is that this blacklisting is, in short order, going to spread like a contagion across the entire web - leaving my infant enterprise expiring from a virtual form of the plague.

So I go back to the stern but helpful electric blue boy. "Move house, sonny to somewhere the landlord takes an interest".

So I did, despite anxieties about making myself "virtually" homeless in the process and now pay rather more than before but get a real service.

But my real issue is that in of my tramping of the highways and byways of the internet trying to get out of this mess I didn't find any hint that any of this could even happen.

That someone sitting in California could in effect close me down for an alleged offence without telling me and with no appeal - and no one cares. Enter hand in hand Kafka and George Orwell . I am hoping against hope to avoid any repetition but rest assured have got my 'Free the News from the Future 1" banners painted up - just in case.

Mike Loftus is director of News from the Future Ltd.