Unsolicited commercial email, a.k.a. spam--the fact that people are willing to cause others so much trouble to make a buck--is a sad sign of our society's bustedness. As if we didn't already have enough legitimate email in our in boxes, we have to deal with the fact that about half of everything we receive is junk. Microsoft Windows users may have more trouble with viruses and worms than with spam, but for those of us lucky enough to dodge those bullets, spam is truly the bane of the internet.

Different sorts of spam add different levels of bustedness to the internet. First, there's targeted spam--for example, textile manufacturers in China who want to supply my t-shirt business. Sure, I'm in their target market (assuming they are legitimate businesses), but it's still junk mail to me. Second, there's untargeted spam. I don't need Viagara. I've never shown any interest in it. So there's no reason for me to be on a mail list for it. Finally, there's offensive spam, the worst of which is the advertisements for porn sites. A lot of the spam peddling Viagara and similar products falls into this category too.

So how can we fix our busted email system? If there were easy answers, it would have happened long ago. Here are a few musings:

* Spammers won't care much about anti-spam laws until spammers start getting nailed, painfully, by them. Encourage the passing of anti-spam laws with teeth, and encourage the use of the teeth.

* It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to convince enough people not to respond to spam--not to click on links in it, etc.--to make spamming unprofitable. But it sure would be nice. Don't respond to spam, don't click links in spam, and educate your friends about the importance of not responding too.

* Charging for sending email is NOT a good idea in my opinion. It would spell the death of too many small businesses that wouldn't be able to afford the cost of sending legitimate email. It would also degrade the experience of internet users as websites refused to use email for many things for which it is the best available method of communication. There must be other solutions.

* If we could get enough people to participate, one good method might be for everyone to go to the websites of people who spam them. Spammers send their emails to a lot of people. If enough of those people came to their sites and clicked around a little, their web servers would be brought to their knees, and their bandwidth costs would skyrocket. But until enough people do this, the idea is worthless. Plus, you don't want to click the links in the emails because doing so often identifies who you are to the spammer, encouraging them to send more to you. Instead, you'd have to type their domain name into your browser, leaving off any parts of the URLs that might tell them who you are. Perhaps email programs could add a feature that displays a list of links which include only domain names, and not everything that comes after them.

This kind of system would have problems though, because sending out spam with links to other peoples' websites would probably become a common form of attacking honest businesses.

* Ultimately, technical solutions are probably going to be required to slow spam to an acceptable level. If we can do that, we also reduce the profit incentive, pushing many spammers out of the business. Spam filters help. Email "white lists" (which only let messages from approved email address through) help, as inconvenient as they sometimes are. But spam won't stop until deployment of spam blocking technology is nearly universal. A complete overhaul of the email system may even be required. Various proposals are in the works for doing just that.

I just received two legitimate emails and one spam. Ah well. It's better than two spams.