Friends --
 
   The problem of spamming is real enough; the question is what is to be
done about it. Here is a suggestion I made to the business librarians'
list:
 
   First, ignoring it will not make it go away. Our experience with
highway billboards, telephone sales, tobacco advertising generally,
etc., etc., teaches us that. Similarly, relying on individuals to post
'protest' notes to the same list that the ad appeared simply compounds
the problem of bandwidth waste and has the unwanted effect of actually
re-enforcing name recognition of the product.
 
   Second, the advertising appears nearly "free" to the advertiser because
it piggybacks on the bandwidth and signal processing of someone else's
computers (which of course is not really free).
 
   So how about this: Each time an advertiser posts a clearly unwelcome
post to a list of, say, 200 subscribers, the list should be programmed to
automatically send back 200 separate 'no thank you' notes to the originator
of the ad. Rather than relying on each individual subscriber to do that --
and eating up their time and bandwidth -- we should use our computer
power to reply, just as the advertiser has used it to reach our subscribers.
 
       I have not writtent he software to do that job, but it would seem
to be a fairly straightforward task.
 
       In any case, we should encourage readers of this list to think
creatively about responding to spamming.
 
                                 Regards,    [log in to unmask]