It may just be because it’s summer and fewer friends are sending me e-mail, but it seems that the sheer volume of spam that I’m getting has gone up a lot in the last few weeks.

Last weekend only sixteen of four hundred and fifty messages were ones I wanted to read, and I spent well over half an hour going through them all.

This is more irritating than normal because I’m away from home at the moment so I'm collecting e-mail over a slow dial-up connection and paying by the second to be online.

So it’s costing me money to receive adverts for ‘natural viagra’, unlikely financial products and other stuff that I don’t want and never asked for.

At least at home I have a broadband connection through my local cable company, so my e-mail comes in fast enough for me not to notice and the price is the same each month.

This means that the spam only costs me time, not pounds on my phone bill.

This increased cost has forced me to concentrate more attention on how to sort spam out.

Even if we get some workable laws in the next year or two, they’ll be ignored by the current crop of illicit spam merchants.

But none of the technical solutions seems to be having much success either.

Some time ago I started using a program called Mailwasher to check my e-mail. It lets me identify spam and delete it before it’s been downloaded, which certainly saves time.

It also lets me send a fake reply to the address the spam came from, saying that my e-mail address is not working.

In theory this should persuade the spammers to stop sending me their rubbish.

But it hasn’t worked at all, as far as I can tell.

This isn’t Mailwasher’s fault – it’s just that the people who send spam are more stupid than we thought they were, and will happily send e-mail to addresses they know are wrong.

Try a different approach

Realising this, a friend of mine is trying a different approach, one which looks a bit more promising.

The first time you send him an e-mail you get a reply asking you to visit a website and confirm that you really did send it.

If you do this then your e-mail address gets added to a list of people who are allowed to send him mail.

Everything else gets thrown away. Especially the spam, which is sent out automatically by programs that just ignore replies asking them to visit the confirmation web page.

The main problem with this sort of spam prevention system is that you have to give your e-mail address to the people running the service.

And that means trusting them.

Sadly, there are many, many examples of companies that collect e-mail addresses for one, good, reason and then end up selling them to other people.

But I’m tempted to sign up for this sort of service.

After all, it seems that bill@andfinally.com is already on so many spam mailing lists around the internet that things couldn’t get much worse.

Have you managed to cut down the spam?
Click here to have your say!

With Fame Academy and Pop Idol back on our TV screens, and Big Brother still filling the occasional newspaper page, it seems that interactive TV is here to stay.

The voting on these programmes is generally done by text message or phone, rather than
e-mail, even though it would seem just as simple to use the net.

You could even have a web page that you visit to cast your vote.

Of course, there’s a good reason for this.

We know how to charge people for sending text messages or making phone calls.

But nobody has yet figured out how to charge someone for sending an e-mail.

And the people running the interactive TV shows like the money they make from each vote cast.

If we did manage to make people pay for each e-mail they sent it would sort out the spam problem, I suppose.

But I doubt that any of us would really want it to happen. After all, sending your e-mails for nothing is one of the real joys of being online.

Would you pay for e-mail?
Click here to have your say!