Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I've generally had a fairly relaxed attitude about Internet spam. Unwanted e-mails in your inbox? Just delete them – it takes a lot less energy than being an anti-spam vigilante.

But I sure don't think that way anymore.

The spam in the inbox has reached a level that annoys even me – sometimes 40 or 50 a day despite the spam filters – as my e-mail address is public in many places. The bigger issue, though, is the way that spam interferes with our publishing efforts. Internet-wide, the spam issue seems to be getting worse and worse as fiendish networks of software programs, or bots, are deployed in the interest of porn peddlers and pump-and-dump stock promoters.

The most obvious and annoying spam problem on NewWest.Net is comment spam, in which spammers place messages and URLs in the comment section of stories. We've taken a lot of measures to combat this and we've beat it down to a minimum, but it's an ongoing struggle as the spammers continually change their tactics. And comment spam is a double-whammy because part of the comment feature is a notification that tells the original author and other commenters by e-mail that there is a new comment – and thus a spam comment can get e-mailed to dozens of people.

The only way we could really lick it would be to require that people be registered users of New West in order to comment on stories – but we really don't want to do that, because a big part of the point of New West is open conversation. That's one of the big reasons that spam is so infuriating: it thrives in an environment of open communication, and of course open communication is exactly what's so great about the internet.

We also have an issue with so-called referrer spam, which I don't even understand entirely but involves spammers linking to and visiting our site in order to indirectly facilitate their activities. While this is generally not visible to readers, it can degrade the performance of our site and it also messes with the statistics programs which enable us to track traffic. We don't even know the exact purpose of some of this phantom activity, but we do know that a lot of it comes from the Ukraine.

It's not that we are lacking expertise on these issues; I have a lot of confidence in our server administrator and others on our tech team. There just are no ready permanent solutions, only an ongoing arms race.

On the other side of the coin, anti-spam measures that others take interfere with our own e-mail publishing efforts. The NewWest.Net e-mails that we send are not spam by any definition – you have to sign up for them, and the content is news and other editorial, not marketing messages. Nonetheless, a fair number of these e-mails never get to their intended recipient due to spam filtering.

There are things that can be done about this, but the solutions are very expensive.

A lot of people in the technology community have been ringing the alarm bells about spam for a long time, and a concerted effort on the part of both industry and governments to combat the problem certainly seems long overdue. The spam in question is all clearly illegal under U.S. and European law; the solutions, admittedly, are not obvious.

It's incredible to me that enough people are interested in penis enlargement, or stupid enough to fall for obviously fraudulent penny stock schemes, to make such a robust and technically sophisticated illegal spam industry sustainable. But the problem is a large one, and it's getting worse every day. Those spams in your inbox are just the tip of the iceberg.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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