Have you noticed just a tad fewer irritating missives in your email box?

There's nothing's wrong with your email service. Do not attempt to adjust your POP server preferences.

Honest, hard working, direct marketing entities that are fair and ethical about using email to sell their goods and services have begun quietly withdrawing to study new laws that target unwanted email. They want to do what they can to keep your business without raising your ire or the ire of their corporate attorneys.

Meanwhile the insistent, insidious, wild dogs of the digital direct marketing underworld continue to electronically strong arm your mailbox. According to Ferris Research Inc., a San Francisco consulting group, unsolicited email has cost the already beleaguered economy $10 billion this year alone in lost productivity and in the extra equipment, software and workers necessary to wrest free from what will be a federal crime, effective Jan. 1, 2004.

The Spam Cartel, says federal officials, is a network of about 200 spam bosses responsible for about 90 percent of all junk mail, which now comprises some 40 to 50 percent of all email -- or much more in some email boxes.

Chances are that money grubbing, deceptive collective will only leave kicking and screaming as it pretends to clean up its act and you may have to lend a few good swift ones to hasten its departure -- but depart it will.

Like the telemarketing stalkers who just wouldn't take 'No' for an answer, the other half of the buying public's most despised direct marketing tag-team is going down for the count.

Spam is getting canned.

Even spammers' beady little eyes can see the legislative writing on the wall.

Federal law recently joined a hodgepodge of some three dozen state regulations designed to flush out a scourge that was turning the Information Superhighway into a back alley.

On Tuesday, Dec. 16 President Bush signed the federal "Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act" (U.S. Senate Bill 877) to outlaw spam you don't want, spam that isn't what it says it is, and spam that is just plain foul.

Among some of the most despised spam is mortgage and real estate spam.

Earlier this year, a Harris Interactive Poll conducted online with 2,221 adults reported that most find spam obnoxious enough to want it to be outlawed and they were particularly annoyed by mortgage and real estate spam -- right up there with pornographic spam.

When asked "Which, if any, of the following spam emails annoy you a lot, those selling ...?" 91 percent said pornography, 79 percent said mortgage and loans, 68 percent said investments, 61 percent said real estate, 41 percent said software, 38 percent said computers and other hardware, and only 3 percent said "none of these annoys me a lot."

It would be poetic justice for that 3 percent to get all the spam the rest of us don't want.

Effective Jan. 1, sweeping federal law, will supersede some stronger state laws and it could take six months to a year before the Federal Trade Commission constructs a Do-Not-Email Registry and begins full enforcement.

Until then, states' can-spam laws may provide speedier and, in many cases, greater protection.

California law, also effective Jan. 1, 2004, for example, requires all spammers sending email to California's residents and all California-based spammers sending spam anywhere to obtain "opt-in" permission before they hit the send-to-1 million-mailboxes button.

That means, they must get your permission to send you spam before they send it. Federal law eventually will let you sign up not to get spam, but first it will enforce your right to tell spammers to beat it, but only after you've been spammed.

With rewards for whistle blowers and the threat of multi-million dollar fines and imprisonment, the federal law will also outlaw using false or misleading transmission information, using deceptive subject headings, and using automated methods (called "email harvesting") of registering multiple e-mail accounts for spamming.

Spammers also will be required to include in their digital junk mail their physical address and a way to allow those they spam to opt out of future mailings. That means companies will have their bottom lines bloated by updating marketing databases to determine if a person has opted out of receiving solicitations.

The new law should also cut down on those infamous rented email lists because many lack time-date stamps to document the timing of an individual's decision to opt out of the spam world.

If the Do Not Call law is any indication, pity the federal workers assigned to monitor the complaints line, compile the Do Not Spam registry and enforce the law.

Stubborn spam shills will repeat the telemarketers' shrill refrain about their rights at the expense of the right to privacy, they will whine about lost jobs and they will cajole, insisting some people really do want spam.

Also if the Do Not Call law is any indication, tens of millions of email users will sign up to say "Spam This."

For those who use the Internet to work, to play, to learn and to love, it's just a matter of time. The Information Superhighway will once again be a top-down, high-speed ride -- this time rolling over virtual vermin destined for road kill status.

Until you can get the top down, and hear the double squish beneath your digital wheels, roll up your sleeves and send your unsolicited email to the existing Federal Trade Commission's spam complaints depository at uce@ftc.gov and help take a bite out of the crime that spam already has become for tens of millions of emailers worldwide.

Published: December 17, 2003

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Broderick Perkins parlayed a career in old-school journalism into a contemporary digital news service that really hits home. The award-winning consumer journalist, originally from Wilmington, DE, is founder, publisher and executive editor of the bootstrap DeadlineNews Group, a Silicon Valley-based editorial content and consulting service specializing in residential real estate, consumer news and related editorial consulting services. The DeadlineNews Group includes the website, DeadlineNews.com, offering real estate editorial content and consulting services, and its back shop, the Deadline Newsroom, an open house on news that really hits home. Perkins obtained his formal journalism education from University of Delaware and a journalism boot camp, the Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California-Berkeley. He went on to 20 years of service as a daily newspaper journalist at the Wilmington, DE News Journal and San Jose, CA Mercury News. Perkins covered housing on the San Jose Mercury News reporting team which earned a General News Reporting Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has also produced real estate, consumer and small business content for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, RealtyTimes.com, Nolo.com, Better Homes and Gardens, the National Association of Realtors, Homestore/Move and Intuit/Quicken among more than three dozen publications. In addition to managing the DeadlineNews Group, Perkins most recently served as chief editorial consultant for Nolo's Essential Guide To Buying Your First Home, Nolo, and writes real estate television scripts for RealtyTimes.com.