One recent weekend, we were discussing his yahoo e-mail account.  (He has a Roadrunner account and a personal account in our own web domain, but he prefers his Yahoo account.) He said,

“It doesn’t take me much time at all to read my e-mail now.”

I said, “How so?”

He replied, “I just flag it all as spam. It goes to a special mailbox and I delete it all at once.”

That is one surefire way of handling spam. However, most of us cannot afford to mass delete all our e-mail because we do get one or two e-mails a day from friends or work associates. Unfortunately, few spam proofing programs are much more discriminating than my husband when it comes time to separate the real mail from the junk.

I invested considerable electronic ink on the subject of spam in April and May articles, but not enough to quell my annoyance at spammers, so here’s another go around. You’ll notice that I spell “spam” with a small “s” out of respect for Hormel & Co. who requested this spelling to put a bit of distance in the human psyche between the worst kind of junk e-mail and their venerable canned ham.

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial (July 2, 2003) entitled “We Must Address the Root Problem of Spam,” Clyde Wayne Crews, Director of Technology Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, made a significant point when he offered this analysis:

What a capital idea! Your e-mail program could include an option to either receive spam or not. If you opt to receive spam, you could sign up for a PayPal account (or the equivalent from a similar entity.) When you receive a spam, and read it for 30 seconds before deleting it, you get an automatic Electronic Funds Transfer of a penny from the sender. If you peruse the mail for a minute, you get two cents. If you actually follow the included hyperlink you get a nickel. If you buy something, you get a ten percent discount on all purchases.

People who have been laid off work, are frequently bored, or want to earn a little pin money could do so by reading spam. Thus fewer would be suckered into phony “work at home” schemes.

Companies could compete for favors from the readers, such as suggestions for improvements to spam to make it a little more attractive to the user.  A spam reader might have a chance at fame by suggesting a more effective euphemism for “male enhancement” or a more believable story than the Nigerian prince angle.

Whatever our solution, it must be more creative than a government-mandated Do Not Spam list. Since lawlessness is staunchly defended in most Internet sectors, a no-spam list would be much less successful than the recently deployed Do Not Call list. Referring to the Do Not Call list, its measure of “success” depends upon whom you ask.

If success is measured by the number of people who want to be on it, the Do Not Call List is an unqualified hit. Undoubtedly, millions of beleaguered telephone owners logged in to send a “get lost” message to telemarketers. However, if you measure the Do Not Call List by its effectiveness, its success might be qualified. I’m beginning to wonder whether this list is the phone company equivalent of an “opt out” e-mail link. Is my registered phone number now being sold to would-be telemarketers?

Several months before the Do Not Call list took effect, my husband installed a Telezapper on our phone. It works on the principle that when a computer-generated call is answered a special tone is sent from the receiving phone. When the calling program gets the tone, it registers as a disconnected phone number and supposedly initiates a process that ultimately deletes the number from the calling database.

By the time we signed up for the Do Not Call list, the zapper and my terse responses to the few telemarketers that did get through had virtually eliminated these annoyance calls. Surprisingly, after we signed up for the Do Not Call list, the number of telemarketing calls we received increased rather than decreased. The telemarketers that managed to connect with me personally, however, were much more apologetic when I reminded them that this number was on the Do Not Call list.

While my husband and I may suffer some small annoyance from the few telemarketers that do breach our barricades, their effect on us is minor compared with their effect on my Dad. We are still seething over the call Dad received recently from a man claiming to have once been his commanding officer during World War II. My Dad still goes to reunions for his military division, so he was very excited to hear from this man, even though Dad could not quite recall who the man was.

The man claimed that fifty years ago, Dad didn’t get as much life insurance as he was entitled to, and he wanted to rectify the “clerical” error. Since my Mom, who handled the business end of the family, passed away three years ago, Dad had only a foggy idea of what the man was talking about. My Dad eagerly made an appointment to reunite with his old “CO” for the next Monday morning. The man called later to confirm the appointment, and Dad mentioned that his son-in-law, a CPA, would also be attending. The “commanding officer” never showed up.

In an effort to protect Dad as much as possible from further scams, my husband got Dad a DirectTV receiver that displays the caller’s number on the TV screen when the phone rings and keeps a history of calls received. My husband scans my Dad’s call history weekly to see what kind of calls my dad is receiving. We registered Dad for the Do Not Call list the same time we registered ourselves, but Dad’s call history is loaded with the disguised or masked phone numbers that raise a red flag for weary telemarketing victims.

As Mr. Crews mentions, the law cannot hold the spammer or the telemarketer responsible because experience shows us that spammers and telemarketers are not responsible people. The logical step then is to go after the companies that provide services to these electronic outlaws.

The government could require the service provider to identify each spammer/telemarketer and monitor the number of telephone calls or e-mail recipients targeted by the spammer/telemarketer per month and charge a fee for anything over, say, five thousand phone numbers or ten thousand e-mail recipients (or whatever is a reasonable number for a company that needs to send legitimate messages such as confirmation e-mails.) The government could allow agencies to amortize this amount over a year and split the amount into twelve so that an occasional fund-raising campaign for a non-profit doesn’t end up costing more than it should. The service provider could also provide a sliding scale, charging more for single e-mails addressed to more than ten senders.

This would apply to all businesses, no exceptions. Non-profit agencies that do their own communicating might be given a break, but agencies that contract spamming and telemarketing services for non-profits should pay.

Since the providers would be required by law to charge for these services spammers couldn’t threaten to change providers to avoid charges. Each provider could supplement their income by charging for excess usage and not feel that someone else was going after their customers by offering it free.

My plan probably sounds Draconian, but one of the advantages of such laws is that they often invoke creative solutions. Perhaps we would see less invasive techniques that get the point across without angering or costing the recipient. For example, I was impressed with the way the Medina Children’s Home, a non-profit agency, avoided the telemarketing bandwagon with a low-tech solution. They printed bright yellow bags with their name, the name of a day (we always get Friday) and a list of items that they especially need. When they target a neighborhood, they place the yellow bags on the front porch of each house in that neighborhood several days before the truck is to arrive. These bags request that the recipient fill the bag and place it on the front porch by 9AM on the specified morning.

This technique costs the Medina Home in gasoline, bags and shoe leather, but I would hope that it has inspired many curmudgeons like me to scour my house looking for items to fill that bag.