Hi Hugh,

Thank you for providing a voice of reason and civlilty regarding SPAM. I personally have no problem with unsolicited email, especially those that pertain to my professional or personal interests. I really don't want to add any more regulatory requirements to the internet (or in any other parts of my life for that matter). Don't we already have enough (mostly unenforceable) rules anyway?

While I also dislike the daily bombardment of spam for penile enlargement creams, Nigerian scams for laundering money via my bank account, and other equally offensive emails, I have no problem setting filters that automatically sort these to the trash where I can easily delete them. I rarely reply to be removed or opt-out since I've heard that this may only verify that they have a live email address that they can sell to others. When offensive spam gets through my filters, I simply add another word or phrase filter that will route it to the trash. This has eliminated about 95% of spam from ever hitting my inbox and rarely prevents a real message from getting through. I do still scan the deleted items for anything that I may have inadvertantly filtered out (which takes about a minute) before I permanently delete them. I sometimes even get a chuckle out of some of the outrageous titles that the spammers use to get through filters.

The ones that I really hate are emails that when opened or only previewed in Outlook Express, automatically launch IE and navigate to a specific web page. These are almost as obnoxious as web pages that use the annoying popup ads that when you try to close it, spawns another popup that when you try to close it, spawns another popup...etc. I'm sure that there is probably a setting that I can use to prevent this behaviour, but I haven't found it yet.

I realize everyone should be concerned about their privacy and obviously many people are also very protective of their email inbox, some to a degree of obsession. Perhaps these people should find an email filter that will only accept emails from those addresses that are in their personal address book (if such a program even exists, if not this could be a great idea for a new product).

I've also often thought about a great service that the phone company could offer rather than rely on the worthless "do not call lists" that telemarketers are supposedly required to maintain and use. They could maintain a list of numbers that you WILL accept calls from and only allow those on the list or those who can key in a PIN to get through, all others get refused or sent to a junk voice mail box. Perhaps some phone companies do offer this service but mine does not, AFAIK. This would be a service that I think many would pay for and it should stop most if not all telemarketing calls (and probably offend some of your friends). Unfortunately, the "stop telemarketing" angle thereby reducing some of their revenue stream is probably why the phone company doesn't offer this service. This could probably also be done with a Voice Mail program on your home computer using Caller ID service, however I haven't researched enough to know if such a program exists.

Combine the 2 above ideas into one program and it could be the next killer app for the home market. But unfortunately, you would probably have to advertise by SPAM email which would immediately alienate and offend your target audience. ;<)

Just my .02 cents