When we count the costs of spam we usually think in terms of bandwidth, the hours spent clearing it out of our systems, and (sometimes) the cost of our anti-spam solution sets.

But there are other, uncounted costs to spam which dwarf those.

One is the loss in productivity we get from being unable to get in touch with people when we need to. On my ZDNet blog for instance I did a piece today on EFF chairman Brad Templeton (right), based on something he'd written on Dave Farber's list.

I e-mailed him as a courtesy. I had no questions. I just wanted to thank him for his wisdom and let him know I would use it.

What I wound up facing was Brad's spam filter, a double opt-in system dubbed Viking. Apparently I didn't respond quickly enough to Viking's commands, because its response to my opting-in again was to send me a second message demanding an opt-in. (All this was done with the laudable goal of proving I'm a man and not a machine.)

The bottom line. We never connected. I had a deadline, and used Brad's words. Perhaps there was no harm done.

But frequently there is harm done in these situations. I've had occasion to accidentally delete someone's note in my Mailwasher system, and then call the person in question asking for a re-send.

What if they're not in on that call? What if they sent something I needed? What if I were disagreeing with Brad in my Open Source post, or he decided after publication I was twisting his words?

The point is this sort of thing happens every day. People can't be reached in the way e-mail promised they would be, due to spam. This raises the cost of doing business for everyone, and the mistakes that result can be catastrophic -- to people, to companies, to relationships.

Now, in honor of the man formerly known as Deep Throat, I'm going to offer yet-another anti-spam solution.

Most U.S. spam is in fact subsidized by big corporations, and when you complain about it they say, "we can't police our distribution channels."

So here's what we do. We find those distributors, and we offer them a deal. You give us evidence that Big Company X approved of this, and you can avoid jail time. Then we use that evidence to sue Big Company X for the big bucks.

The real problem, of course, is that the American CAN-SPAM Law in fact enables spam, by designating a lot of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE) as non-spam and requiring that people opt-out -- a process which has inevitably in the past led to getting more spam.

America is the world's spam capital. Most of the big spammers are Americans, and they're using American servers to terrorize the world on behalf of American corporations.

So let's take Mark Felt's advice, again, shall we?

Follow the money.