> Spam is a serious problem and it could turn the Internet into a
> worthless network faster than we think.
Perhaps I'm not seeing straight, but I don't quite understand why. To me, it looks like a (probably) unavoidable cost of having an Internet that isn't rigidly controlled. Without an authoritarian system of some sort to clamp down on every e-mail sent world-wide, the only thing that can be done is for people who object to e-mails about genital-enlargers and Nigerian fortunes to be had for the simple act of turning over your bank account information to block as much of it as possible as best they can. This does take work time, and people have to be paid for this work, but I wouldn't object to my ISP raising its monthly fee a couple of bucks to set up a more effective filtering system -- even though I don't personally have much of a problem with it, since it only takes me a couple of minutes a day to delete the weird stuff that gets into my in-box.
No perfect technical system will be possible, since computers are much too dumb to understand the meanings of the words humans communicate with, and no completely rigorous definition of what "spam" is can be established, since what is and is not spam is ultimately a subjective judgment.
That said, I can see and sympathize with the problem that one-person ISPs like you have. Perhaps if the mega-ISPs like Earthlink raise their fees a bit, as I suggested above, they can make a big enough dent in the spam flow to ease the burden.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx