Technological advancements are not always good. When email first started it was magic. You could get your buddy’s email address and send him a message to the other side of the world for nothing! Even better, the message was in his computer so that he didn’t have to be home and he could read the message and answer it at his leisure. If your buddy didn’t have email, no sweat. Western Union had a service called, as I remember it, Easy Link that would deliver your message locally for a small fee. Email was fast and free. What could be wrong with that?

The big problem is that it is free. The second big problem is that it can be anonymous. And the biggest problem is that it can be made malicious. Because email is free and relatively easy to broadcast it is ideal for junk mail. You don’t even have to pay for email addresses. You just invent names and log names that correspond to active email recipients. It is so easy to send out say 1,000,000 free messages that one can make money selling buggy whip stocks or potions that make your nose grow longer. Who buys this stuff? I guess one in a million of us is so stupid that we do in fact buy it. There must be a payoff for the Spam generators.

What happened next is beyond belief. There must be a million spammers out there sending out a million messages a minute, and the whole system is bogged down with crap. It takes half an hour minimum to sort through your email, dumping the ads for cheap loans and looking for people who may want to buy your product. At, let’s say, $10 an hour and 100 employees this costs a company about $130,000 a year. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it?

So how do we solve the problem? I’ve heard it said that you can do nothing because the computers that handle the email are scattered all over and therefore out of anyone’s control. Wrong. The computer at your company is under your local control. Enter the spam filter. But you still have to adjust and readjust the filter and re-readjust the filter. You’re still wasting your time. How do you get the spammer to think hard about sending you his message?

The answer is blindingly simple. Make him pay! Instead of a spam filter, set up an e-commerce site and charge the sender $.37 to get through your filter. You can even return the money if someone at your end actually opens the email. Any legitimate user will be willing to pay the earnest money since his message is legitimate and he expects you will open his email. The rest will pass.