let's avoid the monty python reference

Legislating it out of existence isn't working very well. There'll always be countries down on their luck and willing to host a little internet crime -- certainly it's more pleasant than courting other sources of shady national income.

What about technical solutions? Well, we've all got filters on our ISPs and mail clients, but some folks are proposing more radical alterations to how the email system works. Microsoft is pushing a system called Sender ID that adds a server-level check to ensure that all email comes from real users rather than spoofed addresses. But that proposal has been shot down by the technical powers-that-be due to justified concerns over the licensing terms upon which Microsoft was insisting.

There have been other ideas put out as well. Most interesting are those that introduce email postage. Some folks have already implemented such a thing -- the prices are low, but enough to dissuade bulk email. If the postage goes to the recipient of the message, upstanding emailers like you and me should roughly break even.

More interesting -- and practical -- is the idea of a computational fee. Microsoft's Penny Black Research Project is the highest-profile group pursuing this concept. There are different ways to do this, but the most popular formulation involves requiring that unknown sources trying to send you email first complete a math problem specified by the your computer. By requiring, say, ten seconds of processor time per message, a hard limit is introduced to how many messages can be sent in a given period of time.

There are some tricky technical details to get around here, mostly related to the occasional latency of the email system. But even granting that they can be solved, this solution isn't ideal. By the NYT story's estimate, half of all spam is already sent by so-called "zombie" machines: hijacked consumer PCs that send out bulk commercial email under their unwitting owners' noses. A highly parallel system like a zombienet is already poised to get around the Penny Black toll. In the process, an awful lot of energy will be wasted -- those computations aren't free, you know.

The upshot is that there isn't a great technical solution on the table. None of the aforementioned ideas are silver bullets, although all of them would probably improve things to some extent. Similarly, vigorous prosecution of spammers can help make spamming less attractively profitable, even if it can't catch everyone.

But there's something really easy that you can do, right now, to drastically cut down on your future spam. Better yet, it's got that pleasing high-tech sheen to it.

So head over to SpamGourmet.com and register. The site is free, and it provides an invaluable service. When you register you'll create a username. For example, I'll pick the username 'tom'. This gets tied to my real email address -- so yeah, you do have to trust the spamgourmet folks to not do anything evil. So far, they haven't.

Okay, so I now own the 'tom' username. This comes into play when I have to give out my email address to a non-trusted source. Blog comment sections, web bulletin boards, registration-only newspapers, e-commerce sites -- nonsense email addresses work some of the time, but what about when a site requires that you respond to a test email before granting you access? Sometimes you have to give out a working email address to somebody who might turn around and sell it. And even if you trust the site, who's to say they won't someday be acquired by a less scrupulous entity? Better to take advantage of your spamgourmet account by making up an email address on the fly.

Let's say I don't trust amazon.com. Instead of my real email, I'll give them a disposable address like amazon.10.tom@spamgourmet.com. I don't have to go to spamgourmet's site to create this address; it'll be set up automatically when spamgourmet receives the first email from Amazon (or whoever). "Amazon" is the keyword differentiating this address from all the others I'll create. The other important thing to note is the "10" -- this means that only the first ten emails sent to this address will be passed through to my real email account. I can specify any number I'd like, up to 20 -- and if I need to, I can go to my spamgourmet account page and "refill" the amazon address. After the specified number of mailings are used up, the emails start to bounce back to the sender.

Better yet, spamgourmet will alter incoming emails' subject lines, telling you how many more messages it will allow through for the given address, and which address the mail was sent to. So if I receive an unsolicited piece of spam encouraging me to take a more proactive approach toward the size of my genitals, I can glance at the subject line and see (hypothetically) "(verizon: message 4 of 20)" and know that my phone company sold me out to the bad guys.

Neat, huh? It's free, and there's no limit to how many disposable addresses you can create -- I've created 158, according to the site's count. Setting up your account only takes a few seconds -- give it a try. It's drastically cut down on the amount of junk email I receive.