Used to be you’d download your e-mails and get one from a relative, one from a friend and (yippee!), maybe even one from a prospective homebuyer. Now, however, your downloads seldom number less than twenty e-mails and most are unsolicited ads for various body enlargements, or shrinkages, vitamins, loans, bankcards and porn sites.

It’s insane! It’s outa hand. Spam has doubled in the past several months alone! AOL says that just between February and April, the total Spam messages sent to AOL’s 35 million customers totaled 2.4 billion in a single day. In fact, Spam is about to overtake legitimate e-mail on the Web.

AOL blocks about 1.7 billion Spam messages a day and yet still gets about 7 million daily complaints from its subscribers about Spam. So even mighty AOL cannot block all Spam.

Collectively, Internet service providers process nearly 7 BILLION Spam messages daily! If huge online firms, with ultra-sophisticated software, cannot stop Spam, what can you do?

First, get several secondary free e-mail addresses at MSN hotmail, Yahoo, and other sites. Start using these for your online purchases and anything else requiring you to give out an e-mail address online. Never check those boxes giving a Web site permission to send you information and never use your main e-mail address in a chat room. When one e-mail address starts becoming too Spammed, abandon it, get a new one and start over. Use one e-mail for family and friends and another for commercial purposes.

You can also create settings in your Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail program to automatically send certain e-mails containing Spam-like wording to a selected folder, or delete them. Here is what Microsoft says in “Outlook Express Help” about creating message rules.

To create a rule for e-mail messages:

1. On the Tools menu, point to Message Rules, and then click Mail. Message rules cannot be created for IMAP or HTTP e-mail accounts.

2. If this is the first rule you are creating, proceed to step 3. Otherwise, on the Mail Rules tab, click New and proceed to step 4.

3. Select the conditions for your rule by selecting the desired check boxes in the Conditions section. (You must select at least one condition.) You can specify multiple conditions for a single rule by selecting more than one check box. Click the and hyperlink in the Rule Description section to specify whether all of the rule conditions must be met before the specified action occurs (and), or whether at least one must be met (or).

4. Specify the actions for your rule by selecting the desired check boxes in the Actions section. (You must select at least one condition.)

5. Click the underlined hyperlinks in the Rule Description section to specify the conditions or actions for your rule. You can click contains people or contains specific words in the Rule Description section to specify the people or words you'd like Outlook Express to look for in messages. If you enter multiple people or multiple words per condition, use the Options button in the Select People or Type Specific Words dialog boxes to further customize the condition.

6. In the Name of the rule text box, select the default name or type a new name for your rule, and then click OK.

Creating new message rules can easily get rid of the rare identical e-mails (those that contain the same key words), but Spammers keep changing their wording (on From and Subject, and even in the message body). So, rules stop only those annoying consistently worded e-mails from, say, your ex-spouse, ne'er-do-well nephew who always needs something, or from that badgering Indian casino that you sadly owe money to.

Another tactic is to use e-mail aliases made possible by setting up a “catch-all” e-mail address. In this, you can have the part of your e-mail that precedes the “@” say different things and still have those e-mails all come to you. All you need is your own domain name, like mine, www.koelzer.com. If you send me an e-mail addressed to Bill@Koelzer.com, GreekGod@koelzer.com, dork@koelzer.com, coolguy@koelzer.com, JayLeno@koelzer.com, Hemingway@koelzer.com, marketing@koelzer.com or anything you want---I will still receive that e-mail. It doesn’t matter what precedes the “@”. (Just from these few above examples appearing in this very column, I will soon begin receiving Spam addressed to these sample e-mail addresses that include my domain name. See, even I can’t win.)

One small consolation….if I remember to which firm I gave each e-mail address, I can tell where an e-mail is coming from at just a glance. For more on this, read a great column on “catch all” e-mail accounts by my fellow Agent News columnist, Gary Hall.

Realtors®, especially, are easy game for Spammers because Realtors® have so many paid and free links in public Web sites like www.realtor.com, www.realtytimes.com, www.realestateabc.com, www.relibrary.com and dozens of others. Spammers use tools which scan public web sites and “harvest” e-mails found there. Now they are even sending e-mails to text-capable cell phones. Cell providers such as AT&T Wireless so far cannot seem to stop them.

There are Spam filters of all kinds. A popular one is called a challenge-response system. This one tries to verify that a human and not a mass-mailing computer is sending an e-mail before letting the e-mail through. First, the program checks the sender against a known list, often your address book. If the name is not there, a message is sent asking the sender to solve a simple problem. This might be: how many balloons are in this picture?, which is the biggest number?, etc., and then the person solves the problem, clicks SEND, and, if he’s correct, his e-mail gets through. If not, the system stores the e-mail in a “suspicious” folder for you, or deletes it.

This definitely stops most Spam, but there is a danger. It stops good e-mails, too. Say you just made a rental car reservation at Hertz’s web site and their automated system wants to send you a confirmation. Since ConfirmedAuto@Hertz.com is not on your approved list, but is sent by a computer, you may never get the confirmation.

Also, what about other automated e-mails that you do want? These could include ad expiration notices sent to you by real estate directories such as www.agentnews.com, www.realestateabc.com, www.realtor.com and others. How would you know when to renew, unless you had added their renewal-related e-mail address (sometimes impossible to know ahead of time) to your approved list? You could also end up missing the industry newsletters that you subscribe to, and those all-important computer generated e-mail reminders to renew your Web site’s soon-to-expire domain name.

Other Spam filters just take all suspicious e-mails and put them into a quarantine folder, which you have to check frequently to make sure that nothing was put there that you really wanted. Such programs may require so much tinkering that the time they’d save you could easily be lost in the tinkering itself.

For a reliably ranked list of software products, from free, to a range of $20 to $70 that help stop Spam, pick up the August issue of Consumers Reports or visit CR online. (If you don’t yet belong to Consumers Reports online, you should join. It is some of the best few dollars you’ll spend in your lifetime.)

To save you time, I’ve listed below the top nine Spam-blocking software programs as tested by Consumer Reports. These are in the same diminishing order of preference as ranked by CR:

• State Labs (SAProxy) - Free
• Mailshell (SpamCatcher) - $20
• Blue Squirrel (Spam Sleuth) - $30
• Symantec (Spam Alert) - In stores | $70
• MailFrontier (Matador) - $30
• Sunbelt Software (HateSpam) - $20
• FireTrust (MailWasher Pro) - $30
• McAfee (SpamKiller) - In stores | $30
• InterMute (Spam Subtract) - $30

Is there a solution out there? Hah! Spammers use offshore locations that make U.S. policing difficult, though no one is trying very hard right now. Many state and federal agencies could do more to stop Spam, but what is really needed is an international agreement enabling prosecution of the offshore Spammers within the countries in which they operate. Until that happens, count on even more Spam…remember, an e-mail sent to millions of people is so inexpensive that even a few resulting sales is highly profitable to the Spammers. Sending a million messages may cost only about $500. That’s the allure. Thus, poorer people in third-world countries see a goldmine there.

The FTC is befuddled. Last year, FTC research showed that only about a third of requests to be removed from a list were honored. You should, however, forward your own Spam to the FTC and complain about it. That will encourage them to take action---sort of a “noble Spam” that you’d be performing. Forward the Spam messages to uce@ftc.gov. The UCE stands for Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

Should you reply to a Spam e-mail and ask to be removed from their mailing list…even if they provide a link that, when clicked, says that they will delete you? No Sireee! Doing so often only tells them that you are a viable e-mail recipient. You can’t win.

Astonishingly, there is no federal law against Spamming, though 33 states have such laws.

A July 21, 2003 story in Eweek said, “Spam is not a partisan issue, but it is embroiled in politics. In the past, turf battles between the House judiciary and commerce committees ruined chances of a vote on the floor. In addition, disagreements within the committees threaten to slow momentum for passing a measure this year."

“At present, two bills are competing - one authored by Rep. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and the other authored by Reps. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), and Gene Green (D-TX). The Burr bill has the support of both committee chairmen, but the majority of the commerce committee members support the Wilson-Green bill.”

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the ranking Democrat on the full Committee, is a cosponsor of HR 2515, the Wilson bill. He called the Wilson bill a "strong" bill, while the Burr bill "is weaker in several important respects".

Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), a cosponsor of Burr’s HR 2214 and chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet,” said, "Efforts in the last couple of Congresses have fallen short, particularly because of squabbles between Committees of jurisdiction." (The Committees of jurisdiction are the House Commerce Committee and the House Judiciary Committee.) “We may finally be in a position to respond to our constituents' plea for help," added Upton.

Well, duh! Yes, isn’t it about time you politicos quit handcuffing yourselves and act?

So, can you stop the tidal wave of Spam e-mail that you’re getting? No. All you can do right now is to make it less worse. But be afraid. Be very afraid. It is going to get many times worse before it gets any better. The best thing that you can do is to send your own “noble Spam” to uce@ftc.gov and to your state and federal politicians, especially those named above. As you do, urge them to take immediate action to stop a needless malady that costs U.S. productivity (including Realtors®) billions annually.