The beauty of email is that you can communicate in an instant with anyone, anywhere in the world, for FREE. Just the other day I was speaking with Andy Rouse, a world-renowned wildlife photographer that lives in the UK. I couldn't have done that on the phone for less than an Andrew Jackson ($20), if I was lucky. And Postal mail would have taken two weeks. If I had to pay for the email too, Andy and I would never have spoken.

Danny is on the right track. As an individual user, he is doing all that he can to cut down on his personal receipt of junk mail. I myself take the same steps as Danny, just ask Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz how many times I've gotten on him for using my personal email outside the organization [Lots, but I pretty much remember not to, now. Oopsie. -- DG]. If everyone would take these very same steps, spam would be dramatically reduced.

Bob's solution is similar to a system that's currently already in use. Many filters will automatically tag as junk any email that did come from an address in the recipient's address book. As Bob notes though, the initial contact is the hard part, and that's where I've encountered the most difficulty.

I truly wish I had the answer to the spam problem. If I did, I'd bottle it, sell it for $1.99, and become the multi-millionaire I always dreamed of being. Is it really worth the ten naive responses the spammers get to the ten million emails a day they send out? Who knows, but until someone comes up with an unskirtable method of spam control and elimination, the status quo is likely to remain unchanged.

We'll obviously continue to explore, discuss, and suffer this issue for a long time to come. Keep tuned to OutlookPower for the latest news on the quest to save email.