Posted by Gregg at 10:22 AM in Information Industry I've always been a proponent for the commercial use of the internet. When Wired ran the first banner back in 95' I chuckled at the posts on The Well that equated internet advertising with the end of the world. Similarly, when I started getting UCE in my inbox I shrugged it off as easier to deal with than the junk mail delivered to my mailbox each day -- just hit delete and that was that. Well ... the scales have tipped. It's my opinion that the paper junk mail is now far less annoying, inconvenient and intrusive that the spam I receive each day. I get more legitimate email than the average person but the UCE I receive far exceeds the legitimate mail - even if I include email from companies I have a relationship with (even though I may not have asked them to email me) in the legitimate email total the amount of spam is still much greater. Overnight alone I receive about 80 spam messages - with a cable connection at home and a T1 at the office it take about 5 minutes to download it all. I've found no really effective client side solution. Filters in most email clients do a decent job but I've missed important messages from clients and candidates because of them so I end up having to browse through the "deleted" folder anyway. Just hitting "delete" is no longer practical. Pornographic or adult related ads showing up in my 10 year old's inbox in not acceptable. There needs to be some mechanism to hold the large scale spammers accountable and it better come from industry rather than government. Maybe the only way to get to the spammers is to go after their clients. Ultimately, some company is selling the products that the spammers peddle and someone is buying these products. Granted, the cost of sending an email is so cheap that a company doesn’t have to sell very much but they have to attract some buyers or they wouldn’t market this way. It seems as though the pressure point is the merchant – if the spammers won't change maybe the marketers will.

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