My office installation of Outlook Express receives a copy of messages sent to my addresses and opened at home, so the return to work after every holiday begins with sorting through several days'-worth of e-mail I've already read. Although I look wistfully back to the days of 1997 - when browsing through Netscape Communicator continued interrupted by pop-ups, and inboxes were filled only with correspondence you'd invited - I'm relatively unaffected by the noise that less scrupulous people consider commerce. The trickling inflow of spam messages is solved by two mouse clicks every half-hour, and my trusty SpyBot squashes anything particularly nasty on the internet. Exceptions would be mornings like this one, where forty-three out of forty-nine messages were junk. And that's when I share popular opinions like these:
Congress' [anti-spam] bill appears to underestimate just how deeply spam is hated. About 80 percent of consumers want spam banned or limited by law, according to a report from the ePrivacy Group and the Poneman Institute. And 74 percent want a federal do-not-spam list, much like the do-not-call list limiting telemarketing. Another 59 percent want spammers to be punished.
According to the article in Rocky Mountain News, this current attempt at legislation is not the silver bullet desired by the computing public. And to no one's surprise, some companies are playing boths ends against the middle, selling spam filters while opposing strict crackdowns on perpetrators. It'll be a tougher nut to crack than telemarketing, that's for sure. Ah, well: Two more clicks.