Spam is a cancer choking the life out of the Internet

Have you heard the one about the dad who set up a Hotmail account for his son to e-mail his grandmother?

Within weeks, the 7-year-old was getting dozens of unsolicited e-mail messages every day, many of them pornographic.

True, it is.

Funny, it is not.

Spam is out of control, growing in graphic detail and volume every day. It's time for the weaklings in Washington put a stop to this unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Every week, I get a complaint from a client asking how to stop spam, particularly pornographic spam.

"I keep replying with `remove' in the subject line, and my e-mails keep getting returned to me saying that no address exists," a female executive wrote to me recently. "It's really annoying. And it's profane, and it's pornographic. What can I do to get off these spams?"

Unfortunately, not much. Once you've been put on a spam list, your address is sold hundreds of times. It's virtually impossible to be spared from the onslaught of unsolicited graphic images, lewd messages, or pyramid scheme solicitations. In fact, you shouldn't reply to spam. If you ask to be removed from an e-mail list, spammers use that as confirmation of a legitimate e-mail address and send more spam.

I get about 100 spam messages today. Increasingly, more are pornographic.

I'm no prude. But frankly, some of the stuff I get is so obscene I understand the outrage of 7-year-old's father.

It's not just the porno spam I find offensive. All spam is offensive.

It's unsolicited. I never asked for it.

It costs me time and money. Unlike paper junk mail, the vast majority of the costs of spam are borne by recipients, not senders. I have to pay my Internet service provider to download it and mail provider to process it. I have to spend my time to delete it. Spam is like getting a collect call from a telephone solicitor, with no way to reverse the charges.

There have been a host of ineffective strategies formulated by the Internet community to combat spam:

• Ineffective strategy No. 1: Outsmart spammers with technology. Using filters from software or online services, you can try to filter unwanted messages. I find filters marginally effective and difficult to maintain. Filters also risk deleting wanted messages from friends and family. Technology created the problem. It isn't likely to fix it.

• Ineffective strategy No. 2: Complain to the offending Internet providers. If you have good detective skills, you can determine the source of spam (Hint: The true source is often hidden in the message header). The problem with this is the burden is on the victims: message recipients and Internet providers. It also takes too much time to be practical.

• Ineffective strategy No. 3: State laws. About a third of the states have adopted weak anti-spam laws that require spammers to write "ADV" in the subject line or allow recipients to "opt out." The Internet doesn't stop at state boundaries. We need strong national and international laws.

• Ineffective strategy No. 4: Boycott spam senders. The old adage is that if we never buy anything from a spammer, they'll go away. The problem with spam is its economics. Remember, spam costs senders virtually nothing. Recipients bear the cost. Even if one in 100.000 respond, spam is still profitable.

Frankly, the only effective way to reduce spam is to protect your e-mail address. Some advice:

• Remove your e-mail address from your Web site. Spammers send "spiders" to harvest e-mail addresses with "mailto:" headers on Web sites. You can avoid the problem by setting up forms to receive e-mail messages or burying your e-mail address in a graphic that "spiders" can't read.

• Don't publish your e-mail address in public directories or newsgroups. The father whose 7-year-old ended up with the porno spam made the mistake of publishing his address in the white pages, a frequent hunting ground for spammers.

• Get two e-mail addresses. Save one for wanted correspondence. The other can be a free account you give out more freely and change frequently.

If you want something done to stop spam, write your U.S. Senators and Representatives. Congress banned unsolicited commercial faxes 10 years ago because it was unfair to make recipients bear the costs of fax solicitations.

The same thing can and should apply for unsolicited commercial e-mail.

To get your letter read, send it via U.S. Mail. Congress gets so much spam members have learned to ignore e-mail messages -- and the problem.