The worst offenders of this spam can be found lurking in our newspaper's general email box. If I don't go in there on a regular basis—and I'm talking every couple of hours—to sift through the garbage that comes our way, the Willow Glen Resident general mailbox is mired down with ads for every kind of sexual cure and behavior, every pyramid and get-rich scheme, along with a myriad of other sales pitches for items like the smallest digital camera, the best Internet service and the most reliable cell phones.

On any given day my staff will hear me muttering under my breath, "I don't believe this. I just cleaned this mess out an hour ago."

Besides the amount of time I waste functioning as the local spam exterminator, the subject lines I'm deleting—which are impossible not to read because I still have to screen the mail for the real letters—are often downright offensive. And should I neglect this task for, heaven forbid, one day, it's just that much worse when I get back to it. So I have become rather vigilant about the process.

And of course this problem isn't contained to where I work. It happily migrates into my personal email as well.

So what can the average person do about a problem that has become so pervasive it now accounts for approximately 40 percent of all email traffic on the Internet?

Well, there are various congressional bills in the works, so apparently the government is finally getting fed up also and listening to their constituency, who are screaming "enough!"

One bill is being sponsored by local congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, who represents the Willow Glen community. She is hoping to get this nasty situation under control and has teamed up with Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig. She has introduced a bill that will require unsolicited commercial emails to be tagged with a subject line abbreviation "ADV" as an immediate indicator to the recipient that it's probably junk.

But California already passed a law in 1998 that required email solicitors to put this information in the subject box. And it's quite apparent that the law isn't working. Plus, I think most of us want to see spam eliminated, not just labeled and sent.

It's also easy to see why it's basically a failure. The problem is just too massive. How does one monitor the globe? For the law to succeed in California it has to rely on consumer complaints to track down the offending spammer. Well, that's just not realistic. Who has time to call and complain? It's simply a whole lot easier to hit the delete key every time an unwelcome email pops up.

So what makes Lofgren's bill any different or better than what's already out there? Well, according to Lessig and Lofgren, this bill also includes incentives and rewards—20 percent of the fines—for turning in the spammers. In essence, if this bill passed it would create a new individual in the Wild West of space—the cyber spam bounty hunter.

The premise behind the reward feature is that there would be a whole lot of cyber hackers and savvy techy programmers who would be able to trace the spam back to its senders for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a reward given out by the Federal Trade Commission.

OK, in theory this sounds like a terrific idea and to anyone who could help eliminate the overload of email junk running amuck in my mailboxes I say, "More power to you." But in reality I have a hard time believing this will work. Robocop streaking through the Internet seems like a perfect solution, but how can something so completely global ever be spamproof?

Yet the thought of any bill that encourages or creates an endless army of computer bounty hunters to search for the people that peddle pornography, that try to trick people into financial schemes, that sell bogus equipment or don't deliver the promised goods is definitely worth another push through Congress.

And if it should pass and somehow the FTC and the bounty hunters find a way to team up and locate these spammers, then what do we have to lose? Absolutely nothing, except a whole lot of mail that nobody ever wanted to read in the first place.

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Willow Glen Resident. She can be contacted at 400.200.1051 or mmilo@svcn.com.