The story below is "hard-hitting," and calls someone a nasty name.

I've written many items about spam over the years, and will continue to do so. But I admit there is a price to be paid.

For the last two days my inbox has been inundated with hundreds of copies of the same spam. Allegedly it's a message from a Katharine Juarez. Allegedly the topic is transvestite (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's like millions of other spams sent out every day, clogging the Internet's arteries, sending it toward a heart attack.

But when you get the same spam hundreds of times, or thousands of times, we have a different name for it. It's called a mailbomb.

If I didn't have Mailwasher Pro I'd be spending all day, every day, cleaning out this stuff by hand. If I were out of town when this happened, my ISP might threaten to cut me off, because I'm exhausting my account's storage.

Now, this is the fourth or fifth time this has happened to me in the last few months. My guess is some spam list idiot decided it would be funny to put my e-mail address down on their list several hundred times, and sell it as part of a multi-million name spam list. In other words I don't think the person who sent the Katharine Juarez spam knew I was on the list that many times. They just sent the spam to a list. (That's one difference between a marketer and a spammer.)

But note what is going to happen. The list will be sold and re-sold, to many many more spammers. And each one of them will mailbomb me. Within a few months it's possible that even Mailwasher won't be able to keep up.

If you're going to write the truth you have to be ready to pay a price for it. And that's one difference between me and The Washington Post, which we cover in the next item. They seem afraid of the price. I'm not.