Perry writes: > If electronic mail is to continue as a viable > communications medium, we have to stop this > problem, and soon. One "solution" is to bill Internet users for every e-mail they send. I don't especially like the idea, since the actual cost of sending e-mail is extremely low, but the only way to stop spammers is to make it too expensive for them to send spam. I'm not sure how this would be implemented technically. Also, I'm certain that, once implemented, it would be picked up _and_ abused by everyone wanting to make a quick buck (perhaps even by former spammers), and so you'd be paying 100 times more for e-mail than it actually costs. Another problem with this solution is that it would only be implemented by sites that are already rejecting spam relays for the most part, anyway; primitive Third-World sites--the ones with open relays--would not be billing at all. And the whole notion would smack of further surveillance and interference with Internet traffic. Another "solution" would be to stop replying to spam. You may not reply to it, and I don't, but it only takes a very small percentage of recipients responding to make spam cost-effective (since the cost of sending it is almost nil), and as long as someone responds, spam is viable. If nobody answered at all, however, it would be a waste of time. Unfortunately, getting _everyone_ to stop responding to spam isn't really a realistic goal. Neither of these "solutions" is really that satisfactory. I'm not sure what else can be done. FWIW, I receive several hundred spam messages a day. I find that if I set aside every message over about 10K in size, and every message not addressed directly to me, and every message with HTML or other MIME types in it, I catch a large part of the spam. But I still have to clean out a hundred messages or so a day myself. Fortunately it's not hard; spam is really easy to recognize just by the title line in 99.9% of all cases. For the questionable cases, I use the File | Properties dialog in Outlook Express to examine the original message and see if it is worth opening (this avoids any risk of viruses--I have OE set to the Restricted zone and the preview pane is turned off, and the Restricted zone is _really_ restricted on my machine).