You know how veteran cops shake their heads at the naivete and enthusiasm of a new cop? That's how I felt while reading this, a claim by the UN's Internatonal Telecommunications Union (ITU) that spam can be eliminated by 2007. (Image is from Siggraph.)

Here's the money quote. "If we achieve full international co-operation among governments and software companies, this plague which affects so many of us in our everyday life will be defeated in short order," said Robert Horton, Australia's top regulator.

The key word here is if.

The fact is that we still haven't defined what spam is. U.S. law today, in the form of the CAN-SPAM Act, specifically legalizes spam-that-is-not-spam, namely e-mail messages sent to me that I did not ask for.

Even beyond that, every sign-up for a major e-mail box service, like Hotmail, includes pre-checked calls for "service" e-mails, which are also spam-that-is-not-spam. Thousands of people every day either fail to un-check these boxes, or check them and then forget they checked them, adding to the flood.

On top of that, we have the refusal of even legitimate e-mail marketers to age and purge their lists. The so-called e-mail marketing industry has yet to learn that a 500-name list of buyers is far more valuable than a 50,000 name list of suspects. Only by increasing the intrinsic value of mailings, making them wanted, and then by strictly limiting the number of people who are allowed to get them, will the industry ever come to life.