Spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) has the dubious honor of being the most unwelcome thing in developed nations, second only to painful death or Drunk Uncle Bob’s vaguely lecherous comments. Initially just a sprinkling of special offers from Yahoo! amongst one’s messages from the Save the Whales mailing list, spam has now become so proliferous that it’s easy for real correspondence to get lost in the deluge.

People hate spam — unless they’re the people earning thousands of dollars sending it out — and will go to great lengths to eradicate it. Nearly every proprietary e-mail client comes with a junk mail filter that aims to identify spam, and there’s no shortage of add-on programs that claim to kill more bulk mail than all the competitors.

Of course, no e-mail filter is perfect, and with every technological advance designed to single out spam and delete it, spammers come up with a new method of evasion. Now, when programs are equipped with algorithms to analyze the subject lines and message bodies of all incoming mail, junk e-mailers have devised ways to disguise “tip-off” words, such as “free,” “discount” and “goats.” Rob Cockerham of cockeyed.com recently calculated that there are approximately 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 — that’s 1.3 sextillion — ways to spell “Viagra” using the two techniques spammers employ most: replacing letters with symbols that resemble them, such as “Vi@gra,” and interspersing symbols with the letters of the word, as in “V.i.a.g.r.a.”

And one of the newest methods for disguising spam is the random subject approach, where bizarre words are arbitrarily assigned to the subject line by a computer. This is my personal favorite technique, as it yields some extremely esoteric — and sometimes oddly poetic — results. I occasionally scroll through my junk mail box and create avant-garde theatre pieces with dialogue composed solely of spam subject lines.

Ujbvilblg: (standing on one foot while painting a lemon with toothpaste) “Dramaturgy.”
Luella Painter: (rowing an upside-down canoe across the stage) “Advocate vertex!”
Damion Plummer and Carole Shepard: (rubbing each other with large, honey-filled balloons) “Hydrophilic. Yow!”
Entire company: (jumping up in the air) “Yow!”
Frederick Pugh: (eating gummi worms with chopsticks in his nostrils) “Get those inches vinegar argue blocky.”
Entire company: (stomping feet) “Blocky! Vinegar argue blocky!”
Ruthie Marrero: (standing on head wearing bikini of angry bees) “Italian-crafted Rolex for $99.00 and deserve algiers honesty myron staunton grassland Boylston eastward preemptor alpheratz carefree concurrent cathodic bolshevism descendent enmity spicy copperfield indorse diminutive blow bogy foster naiad.”

With infinitely many ways of cloaking junk mail, it comes as no surprise that filters have a hard time keeping up.

In 2003 Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act, which provided that unsolicited commercial e-mail must: be clearly identified as a solicitation; offer a legitimate way to opt out of receiving future mailings; and contain a genuine return address. The act also states that the FTC will soon submit a proposal for a “Do Not E-mail” registry, similar to the Do Not Call list that made people across America weep with joy.

Have all our dreams come true? Could the Do Not E-mail Registry finally exorcise the demonic spam that possesses our inboxes?

Probably not.

For one thing, telemarketing and bulk e-mailing are inherently different forms of advertising, and what works for the goose doesn’t always work for the gander. E-mailing has a much lower labor-to-output ratio; a single person can send a piece of junk mail to thousands of people at the click of a button. A spammer can flood servers with millions of illegal messages before he gets traced, switching to a new ISP every time his current one bans him. Telemarketing, on the other hand, is a much less efficient way of contacting people, and because it’s usually a legitimate enterprise it’s far more difficult to pack up and leave.

Due to this disparity, e-mail and telephone marketing attract companies from opposite ends of the spectrum. Legitimate corporations — insurance companies, cable providers, etc. — employ the latter. Shady overseas pharmacies that want to enlarge your penis by up to three inches employ the former.

If Geico doesn’t follow the regulations of the Do Not Call list, their gecko’s going to be subpoenaed. But if Joe’s Real Good Mortgages decides to flout the FTC’s provisions, it’s a lot harder to track down and prosecute the eponymous Joe. Most spammers already disregard the rules: solicitations are disguised with subject headers like “Re: hey,” return addresses are forged, and the unsubscribe option is just a way to trick people into confirming that their e-mail address is active. If these people don’t follow the rules that are in place now, why would they follow even stricter regulations?

It’s impossible to completely eliminate spam. Moreover, if it were possible, would it be worth it? The Internet is built on a foundation of advertising; it’s because of those blinking, flashing banners and those grating pop-up ads that your cousin Jeff can put up his free Geocities webpage with all the photos from the family reunion. You probably have a free e-mail account at Hotmail and have wasted precious hours taking free diagnostic tests at eMode. Yes, it’s annoying to have to sift through dozens of e-mails about discount Xanax and horny housewives, but that’s the price we pay for having convenient, cheap communication at our fingertips.

The only way to really put an end to spam is to ignore it. If junk mail generates no customers, it won’t be worth the money the company pays to send it out. In the meantime, have fun checking out your cousin’s photo album — I hear Uncle Bob got into the punch again.