When e-mailing first became popular during the early 1990s, it 
was seen by many as a quick, convenient and easy way to send a 
message or image to friends and acquaintances.  After all, this 
is what it was intended to do.  On the up side, it eliminated 
trips to the post office and stationery store.  Unfortunately, 
there was also a down side –it was easily exploited by some as 
a cheap, simple way to send unsolicited advertisements to lots 
and lots of people.

Since 1994, the sending of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail, 
otherwise known as spam (a term borrowed from an old Monty 
Python satire) has escalated exponentially.  Some professional
spammers send as many as ten million messages daily.  But even 
if only one in 10,000 people respond, spam can obviously be 
profitable – otherwise, no one would bother to send it.  

For those such as authors, who legitimately want to put their 
articles into the hands of publishers, there are services such 
as the phantom writers (http://www.thephantomwriters.com), who 
send to their lists of thousands of sources.  However, this is 
all opt-in and perfectly appropriate. And in most cases, services 
such as this actually deliver their email to double opt-in lists.

One British spam tracking service, Spamhaus, estimates that more 
than 80% of all e-mails sent in the U.S. are spam, and in Europe,
the number exceeds 50%.  This is expensive, costing billions of 
dollars in lost business and taking up computing capacity that 
spammers use for free.  In addition, computer security is 
compromised.

This has long been recognized as a critical problem, and a 
variety of solutions have been proposed.  It has been suggested 
that perhaps there should be a small charge for sending and/or 
receiving e-mail to cut down on traffic  The problem with that 
suggestion is that the spammers won’t end up paying, but instead 
will post using a fraudulent account.  

The U.S. Government even came up with its own bright solution 
to create a “do not spam” list, modeled on the “do not call” 
registry that has been so successful.  The problem there is that 
this isn’t going to stop spammers, many of whom are located 
outside the U.S.  It will simply confirm live e-mail addresses, 
providing more incentive to send the stuff.  This suggestion 
was quickly scrapped.  

Currently, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and AOL are working to find 
an acceptable solution.  It’s going to be a very difficult task 
and may take a lot of compromise among these companies.  However,
from this vantage point, it looks as though whatever is proposed, 
the spammers are going to be one step ahead.