Several months ago, I wrote a piece dealing with the scourge of unsolicited telephone advertising I had been suffering through. (See Belly of the Whale, Vol. 12.) Not much came of my letters to various legislators, but I was able to stem much of the onslaught with a few well-scripted retorts and comebacks. For whatever reasons, the calls have subsided to only a few each month. Of course, things never get too dull around my home and business. Now I have a new problem to replace that one: junk email.

I had always thought that my daily snail-mail deliveries were a curse on the poor guy who had to schlep all that junk to my mailbox. If there weren't an occassional piece of first-class mail in the daily pile, I would've simply asked him to skip my home and office except for packages. Well, now I have some perspective. At least in the hard copy, there were a few "picturesque" catalogues and a smattering of quasi-useful coupons and sample publications every now and then. But the junk email I've been getting is absolutely the most offensive, idiotic, imbicillic crap I could ever have been smitten with. I often find it hard to believe that the plankton generating all these get-rich-quick chain letters and pyramid schemes have enough intelligence to work the computers they're using to send this stuff!

Some preliminary research has led me to believe that electronic junkmail is second only to viruses as the biggest problem facing internet users. In my case, it's the worst. Because I use the Usenet (i.e. newsgroups) so frequently for research and technological development, as well as for buying and selling collectibles, I've become a prime target. While the perpetrators of junk email use several sources, the most common are lists that have been gleaned from return email addresses in Usenet postings. There are several programs available that will scan through all the messages in a newsgroup and pull out all email addresses. Many entrepreneurs use these programs and then sell the lists to others. This is similar to what's done with magazine subscriptions, mail order houses, etc., but it differs in one significant manner: the internet has no centralized agency where I can add my name and email address to a "don't send junkmail" list.

There are literally hundreds of web sites and scores of newsgroups trying to deal with the explosive growth of this problem, so I won't take up a lot of space here rehashing the myriad material available on this subject. What I'm concerned with, besides my own overworked and abused emailbox, is the reluctance of people to include their email addresses in messages they're posting on SofTech's various bulletin boards. I certainly don't blame them for wanting to avoid the trap that I'm trying to climb out of. However, since the purpose of many of these boards is to provide a meeting place for disconnected friends, I'm worried about their effectiveness. Therefore, I'd like to offer the following little tidbit that seems to be working quite well for me.

• Whenever you want to provide your email address in a public place, insert a "dummy" node or two in the middle of the address. For example, if your address were Jane@jungle.com, then you would post it as Jane@jungle.snakesville.com.
• Then provide a short instruction for the recipient somewhere in the body of whatever you're posting (a letter, a message on a bulletin board, etc.) that explains what to do to restore your actual address. For example: "To use my email address, remove all nodes with animals in them."
• Most people "hijacking" these email addresses either use programs to do so, or rarely read the body of the messages. Therefore, they'll end up wasting their time and money (I hope) sending their junk to a non-existent address.

Of course, this is not the best solution, but it works. Hopefully, a way to curtail this insidious problem will be developed without government intervention (which is typically the worst approach, especially for internet users). Meanwhile, I'll just have to continue reading up on methods of dealing with the neverending etrash. Rather than adding a lot of links here for email abuse solutions, I suggest you use a search tool and look for the phrase "email abuse". You'll be astonished at the number of sites covering this problem.

Thanks for stopping by. I update this column once or twice each month to discuss various issues ranging from software development to the meaning of life. Please check back soon.