• I can afford,
• might look as nice on me as it does on the 90-lb. model, and
• doesn’t look like a Halloween costume.

A similar reality plays in my mind when I filter the spam from my Outlook Express™ inbox. Day after day, I flag the spam, block the senders, expand my blocked domains list and add new rules to my Message Rules list. In four months, I have had about as much success as I do with the Neiman-Marcus catalog. Now, however, I have to check my Deleted Items folder daily because legitimate e-mails show up there, while spam messages land in my inbox.

In spite of disappointing results, I don’t consider the time spent filtering e-mail a waste. I have learned a lot about spam’s behavior and the persistence of its perpetrators. In the light of a recent Direct Marketing Association survey, one can see why. The survey found that at least nine percent of e-mail users have made a purchase in the past 12 months as a result of an unsolicited e-mail. Thirty percent have made a purchase in the same period as a result of solicited e-mails, (myself included—I never walk away from a Johnny Carrino’s coupon.)

Still I grow weary of hearing from the morally bankrupt Bozos who daily insist that I need Viagra, Xanax and male enhancement products. I’m a little mystified that Pfizer and other legitimate drug companies haven’t launched a campaign to extricate themselves from the clutches of these marketing hacks before their prize brand names become synonymous with spam.

Building a message rule library requires persistence to work around the fact that spammers purposefully misspell “red flag” words like “Viagra” to get past the rules. “Viagra” is just as likely to be spelled “V]iagra”, “V[iagra”, “V!agra”, “V)iagra,” and the like.

Spammers get past your “blocked senders” list by changing return addresses, sometimes with each new spam mailing. List building is also hampered by the fact that a lot of the junk e-mails sport Earthlink, Hotmail, Yahoo accounts as return addresses. As I mentioned in my January column, you can report spammers to these domains, but the domains simply claim that the spammer could not possibly be one of their subscribers. This may be so, but these domains get a black eye every time a disgusting spam mail arrives in someone’s mailbox with their domain on the return address. Were it my domain, I would be just as interested in going after spammers falsely using my domain name as I am in punishing my own subscribers who violate the spamming rules. Another building problem is that thousands, perhaps millions of domains exist that are obviously created for the sole purpose of spamming. For this reason, I believe the ultimate solution is a spam blocker that already has millions of domains programmed into its filters.

I had planned to test one or two spam blockers and report the results this month. Christmas, a full house during the holidays, and a case of strep throat after the holidays derailed my plans. I’ll try to have results in another month or two.

In the meantime, I would like to offer some of the insights and commentary regarding spam that I have seen over the last few months. My own observation is that I am receiving several e-mails a week that feature random words that do not flow together into sentences. A line might read like this:

“Aggregate telephone boxwood hermetic glandular calendar bottle mousepad.”

The e-mail includes ten or more lines of these cryptic messages. If you know what this is about, or would like to speculate, please e-mail me and let me know. I’m mystified.

Another observation:
spammers are not the only Direct Marketers who are getting malicious about our response to their offerings. Are you as annoyed as I am with the credit card mongers who have taken to putting fake credit cards in their junk mails? I can think of no purpose these cards serve other than to break your shredder if you try to shred the envelope without opening it first.

While members of the Direct Marketing Association bring us such joy, the DMA itself has expressed its opposition to provisions in bills before Congress that would allow Internet service providers to establish rules for unsolicited e-mail and give individuals the right to sue spammers. Jerry Cerasale, the association's senior vice president of government affairs, argues that his group already sets guidelines on how to label e-mail headers and subject lines accurately.

The State of California obviously didn’t consult Mr. Cerasale before it passed legislation to punish spammers with a harsh penalty: $1,000 per errant e-mail, payable to individual complainants. There's a million-dollar ceiling per "incident," but each transmission not containing "substantially similar content" would count as a separate incident. Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com fears that this kind of legislation will place us squarely between the spammers and the trial lawyers.

A web domain that I mentioned in January’s article, SpamCop.net, offers a chance for revenge if you are plagued with spam. You can send spam reports to them and they will use their collective power to bring them to the attention of the Internet Service Providers involved. The reporting service is free, although the web page admits that the reporting process is slower and more cumbersome for non-members because of banner ads and such (membership requires a fee). The website provides instructions for reporting using Outlook Express 4, 5 and 6, which I paraphrase here:

With viruses, worms and Trojan horses being spread via email, many users now work with the preview screen in Outlook Express turned off. Viewing the contents of email in the preview screen is no different from opening the message. If the email has malicious content, it may execute in the preview screen.

If you have the preview pane turned off, you can use the following keyboard instructions to get to the message source:

1. Highlight the message in the folder
2. Press alt & enter - this will open a message information window
3. Press Ctrl & Tab - this changes to the "Details" tab
4. Press Alt & m - the opens the message source
5. Press Ctrl & a - to select all the text
6. Press Ctrl & c - to copy the selected text to the clipboard
7. Press Alt & F4 - to close the message source window
8. Press the Esc key - to close the information window

Now that you have the information you need from the e-mail, follow these instructions:

1. Switch to the SpamCop reporting page
2. With the cursor in the parsing box, press Ctrl & v to paste the clipboard contents into the window
3. Click the Process Spam button.

The most promising spam remedy I have seen suggested was submitted by R. Stross to Lee Gomes’ Wall Street Journal “Boom Town” column. Mr. Stross writes:

Then there are the advertisers that try to play both side of the equation. A New York firm, KMGI Software Inc., is giving away free anti-spamming software. The free software comes embedded with a surprise for the weary user: advertisements from companies desperate to reach online users sick of being deluged with online pitches.

IMT Strategies, a Stamford, Conn., e-mail-marketing research firm may have good news, however. Its research indicates that nearly 80% of e-mail users delete unsolicited e-mail without reading it. With this in mind, many businesses are looking for ways to revise their strategies, realizing that an increasing number of consumers simply hit the "delete" key rather than sift through the garbage. Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters Corp., a privacy-advocacy firm in Green Brook, N.J. comments that spam is