At first glance, spam is merely annoying e-mail messages inviting you to buy penny stocks or catch an eyeful of Tiffani and her coterie of college cuties. But in reality, spam (aka Unsolicited Commercial E-mail or UCE) is a scourge that costs consumers money, slows down the Internet, and renders online forums unusable and information hard to find.

Would you accept an advertising flyer postage due? Then don't accept spam. Because spam is cheap and easy, UCE has been flooding the Internet, forcing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to pay for lost productivity as well as additional bandwidth, disk space, and server resources. Those expenses are passed on to you, the consumer. The bulk of spam is so great that $2 to $3 of every e-mail user's monthly bill goes to spam-fighting efforts and equipment upgrades by their ISPs.

This form of intrusive advertising also has the chilling effect of eroding the very foundations of e-commerce. A survey of 1,410 e-mail users by the Spam Recycling Center, an organization that tracks spam and forwards it to the appropriate government agencies, revealed that more than 70 percent of respondents believe it is at least "somewhat likely" that spammers targeted them because they had shopped online. This lack of trust in e-commerce hurts legitimate companies that do business online.

As if that weren't bad enough, spam is illegal in many places. Many states have instituted spam-specific laws, and several federal laws have been proposed.

Despite the fact that the majority of e-mail users dislike spam, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), an organization with 4,800 members, still sees spam as a valuable marketing tool. The porn spam and stock scams are ruining UCE for legitimate businesses, the DMA says–conveniently forgetting the cost-shifting aspect of spam. On January 10, 2000, the DMA launched the e-Mail Preference Service (e-MPS), which allows consumers to add their e-mail addresses to a "do not send" list similar to the DMA's Direct Mail Preference Service for postal mail. e-MPS is a smoke screen to make people think that the industry is regulating itself and that spam is not a problem.

Sneakemail is a free service that you can use to generate disposable email addresses. These "sneak email" addresses are aliases of your real address, which is kept hidden. You can enter these Sneakemail addresses into web forms or use them to contact e-businesses without the risk of your real address being abused or bought and sold.

CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

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