What steps can we take to fight spam?

There are good reasons for praying that spammers be included in the group of souls to be sent directly to the deepest hell after they leave their body -- along with the souls of computer virus makers.

First, they rudely intrude in our lives. Second, their unsolicited messages -- called spam -- fill up our hard disk and create a lot of mess. Third, for people who still have to use dial-up Internet access, spam adds to their Internet access cost. The more spam flows from their mail server into their computer, the longer they have to connect to the provider and the more they have to pay not to mention telephone air time.

Spammers indiscriminately dump anything on every e-mail address that they come across. They send junk mail, pornography, invitations to participate in get-rich-quick scams, multilevel offering, you name it. Different estimates put the amount of junk e-mail to between 35 percent and 50 percent of all e-mail traffic. Just imagine how many resources are wasted.

What can we do to fight spam? Not much, unfortunately. We can diligently put each of the junk mail senders into our blacklists, but spammers usually use a different identity each time. We can forward the e-mail to the "abused" address at Hotmail, Yahoo and other providers of free e-mail services, but spammers always create a new account to continue their operations. Recently, for instance, some Internet users in Indonesia received e-mail from KLIK BCA, which turned out to be spam sent out of a Telkomnet account.

We can create a list of words that our browser should look out for and block from entering our Inbox. However, the filter would not be able to distinguish between profanity and benign health information.

A lot of the spammers also plant applets on our hard disks so that a window will pop up from time to time on the screen, giving us the shock of our life with totally indecent images. The problem could reach the extreme if we happen to share our home PC with our young children.

Last month, David Berlind wrote on ZDNet how he feared spam could "kill the Internet." If the blacklist keeps growing, he said, it would virtually block all e-mail -- both the junk and the innocent. I would like to say that this would not happen. What we may see is a much reduced usefulness of the e-mail facility, which is the Internet's killer application, as some legitimate mail would never reach its destination. However, there is no guarantee that spammers will never get so cruel that they may also use the e-mail addresses of our family members, relatives, close friends, etc. If that happens, or all domains are blocked, no e-mail would get through, and David's nightmare would become a reality. No wonder the entire world is now struggling to find the most effective way to fight spam.

At any rate, spam slows down the Internet by clogging the infrastructure with packets of mostly useless, if not offensive, content. It also increases the providers' operation costs, as they have to constantly monitor the activity of each of their customers and preferably block spam before they leave their servers. One telltale sign they usually use is an e-mail message sent to an unreasonably long list of recipients.

One thing to keep in mind is you had better not reply to the junk mail. It will not work, and it will only increase traffic. If you are boiling with rage and you lash out on the sender, he can easily retaliate by bombarding you with more junk mail. You cannot win. Like viruses, spam will continue to be part of our Internet world.

There are software, services and even hardware being offered to help organizations and end users deal with spam. They include Postal Inspector 3.0 (www.giantcompany.com), SpamKiller (www.mcafee.com), and Mail Washer (www.mailwasher.net), to name just a few. SpamKiller, a McAfee product, even helps you fight back spammers -- if you still insist on going into a battle you are unlikely to win. The funny thing about McAfee is that now the company also resorts to using pop-up windows to promote its products, and that is exactly a step that significantly reduces my respect for it.

It is an uphill battle. The best protection is to exercise great care when sharing your e-mail address. Unfortunately, that is not always easy to do, especially if you are a columnist who wants to make it easy for your readers to communicate with you.

-- Zatni Arbi