I'm at a point in my website publishing career, that I don't know what I'd do without spam filtering technology.

Take a look at the some of top e-mail spam titles that I received in the last seven days:

1. "All love enhancers on one portal!" (33 occurrences)
2. "All products for your health!" (32 occurrences)
3. "Any med for your girl to be happy" (15 occurrences)
4. "Best love dr@gs at the best store!" (27 occurrences)
5. "Full of health? Then don't click!" (25 occurrences)
6. "Need medicine? All here!" (20 occurrences)
7. "Our store is your cureall!" (24 occurrences)
8. "She wants a better sex? All you need's here!" (37 occurrences)
9. "We cure any disease!" (15 occurrences)
10. "Why seek? Choose any love pi11 you want!" (36 occurrences)

And these spams are all from the same sender! It's all drug stuff.

I'm getting about 400-500 e-mail spams a day. Most of it is getting caught in the spam filter right off the bat. I've been using Trend Micro. It's working better than Symantec's Norton Anti-Spam. I have to go through the spam filter once a day to pull out stuff that isn't spam. But I'd rather have it this way, then having too much spam finding its way into my in-box. I stil delete out about 20 spams from my in-box, per day.

Then there's comment spam on my blogs. Junk Food Blog had a really big problem, getting about 40-50 such spams consisting of about 130K bytes of hyperlinked text, per spam. I had to delete it out, which became very tedious. So, I disabled anonymous comments, and set it to moderated.

I'm also getting a fair amount of unwanted solicitations through our fax machine. We never give out our fax number. We never have anyone fax stuff to us. But somehow, someone's got machine that randomly dial numbers and listens for a modem sound. Now we must be on a "fax spam" list.

And there's still the telephone solicitations. We get a few of those each day. Most all of them are these phone banks. You can tell because when you answer, "Hello?", you'll hear silence for about 3-5 seconds, and then someone picks up and talks to you. So, when I hear that initial silence for 2-3 seconds, I hang up.

We also get a bunch of junk mail, which I suppose is the original spam. No one complains too much about getting junk mail, but boy do they complain about e-mail spam! Which is exactly what I'm doing on this post.

The difference between junk mail and e-mail spam, is that with junk mail, the senders pay the deliverer (USPS) a fee to send each one. With e-mail spam, the sender doesn't have to pay someone to route the spam to the appropriate e-mail account. If AOL received a fee for each spam it delivered to its recipients, will we have free Internet?