What to do when you've had enough spam

Throughout marketing history, businesses have always focused on getting a product message to the people by using any method possible.

When highways were built across the country, advertisements were painted on the sides of barns and on little signs along the road.

When telephone companies began to publish directories, solicitors were dialing telephone numbers and mailing coupons.

Radio stations started broadcasting advertisements and inserted product names in the scripts of the radio shows. Signs were showing up everywhere. On the sides of buildings. On water towers, on people and even on the tail-end of airplanes.

Advertising became big business.

For their own survival, advertisers have had to take advantage of any technology they could find and they have now discovered a couple of great ones the wonderful tools of the computer database and Internet e-mail system.

The option to use junk mail as an advertising medium is being replaced by the method of e-mail soliciting known affectionately as spam. There is money to be made using spam, both for the mass e-mailers and their clients.

"Soliciting-by-e-mail" businesses are feeding their databases with e-mail addresses and offering a service to mass e-mail a commercial message to every e- mail address they know for a fraction of the cost of posting conventional mail out to a few thousand "Occupants." They have made spam a common part of our Internet experience and having to endure spam brings up some interesting questions.

Are there laws to combat spam?

There have been anti-spam bills brought before Congress, but none became law. Legislation to control or eliminate spam has been considered in the federal level since the 105th Congress was in session. A few bills, like HR95 the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001 are now pending in the 107th Congress. Because of the absence of strong federal legislation, some state and local governments took matters into their own hands and passed their own laws. On June 6 of this year, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that state's anti-spam law.

Are anti-spam laws effective enough to stop it?

Laws are only effective in the jurisdiction where the laws can be enforced. How will an anti-spam law in the United States stop a "soliciting-by-e-mail" business based in Brazil, in Denmark or in Japan? The e-mail system of Internet is an international entity.

If the United States outlawed spammers in this country, the spamming businesses would leave and flourish elsewhere. It may not be possible to put spamming out of business until every country outlaws spam businesses.

How can you fight spam?

When your e-mail address gets on a list, there is little that can be done to get off the list. With the help of some software, filtering techniques and some simple rules, you may reduce your spam:

The first thing to do is don't reply to spam. Mass e-mailers sell their service to businesses with the promise that their e-mail address databases are current with active e-mail addresses.

One of the best techniques to confirm that your e-mail address is active is to lure you to respond to a message like "To be removed, reply to this message with remove' in the subject line." If you respond, the mass e-mailer may not send you another message from the client your message came from, but then they will know that your e-mail account is active and will use it for other clients.

Check a Web site's privacy policy before you give out your e-mail address. In more cases than not, businesses on the World Wide Web will post and follow a privacy policy on what they do with the information they get from you.

If they do not have a statement saying that they will keep your e-mail address a secret, then you may want to leave that information to yourself or use an alias like not@this_e-mail_address.com.

Do not post your e-mail address on your Web site. There are businesses with computers using programs to search the Web for e-mail addresses on Web pages. They collect all the e-mail addresses they can find and sell the information.

If you need to have an e-mail address, use a script program in your Web page. A script program, like JavaScript, will write your address on the Web page after it is downloaded by the user.

Never buy anything advertised in spam. That is like putting fuel on the fire. Consider the idea that if no one buys from a business using mass e-mailing then no business will use mass e-mailing.

Use a spam filter. Commercial e-mail programs have methods to organize your incoming e-mail. Many have filters that can be set up to scan the subject line of your e-mail.

If you analyze the subject of your e-mail messages, your spam-mail will have attention-grabbers like: $$$, sex, Free, XXX, HUGE, etc. By setting some rules to a filter, your e-mail can be sorted and the spam can be put into its own separate folder.

There are commercial filtering services and programs that can be used with your e-mail program. But for those who use Web-based e-mail services, there may not be any filtering options.

An option to report offending spam to your Internet service provider may not get any positive results. Most ISPs do not have the technology or the manpower to find or block out the spammers.

An Internet service is not like the telephone service where the offending call can possibly be traced. Information travels through the Internet in pieces through several servers and the source of the e-mail can be elusive.

Like traffic jams and flight delays, apparently spam is here to stay.

(Randel H. Hanes is the owner of Hanes' Desktop Network, a Web site development and other computer information services firm.)