"MAYDAY MAYDAY, UNSUBSCRIBE, I REPEAT, UNSUBSCRIBE"

"Dear Sir/Madam, Please remove my email address from your list. Thank you in advance."

"Dear Sir/Madam, I have formerly requested my email address removal from your list but it seems my request did not make it to the responsible person. Please remove my address from your list. Thank you for your consideration."

"Dear Sir/Madam, You are to immediately cease sending any information to my email address. I have consulted with my lawyers and we may consider legal action against you and/or the business entities you represent. Regards."

"PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take my email address off your list. PLEASE."

"UNSUBSCRIBE NOW…WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE }: -("

Admittedly, my entreats and threats fell on deaf spammers' ears.

In the beginning I had an email address. Once or twice a week, I would logon to my email account. On a good day I may have the fortune of receiving one or two courtesy Hello emails or an old joke forwarded to me for the umpteenth time. It was still a pleasure to browse the highlighted new messages. The technology was in its infancy and few knew how to operate it. The rites of passage filtered out the fainthearted so only those who mastered the technology and wrote acceptably well ventured into the dark exclusive domain of internet email.

Ever since the Internet became synonymous with home appliances, the genie was out of the bottle and all hell broke lose. Presently, I dread the moment of logging in. What usually awaits me is torrent of junk, offensive, or useless email. But buried deep within every 10 or 20 unsolicited emails, is an old fashion Hello email I may fail to notice and accidentally send to the email graveyard while in the process of exorcising my inbox from useless matter.

Sure the law now mandates the removal of my email address from a list upon my request, but a Lithuanian spammer does not recognize US law and we can't leverage NATO assets for this one either, unfortunately.

As for the new anti-spam laws Congress passed recently, well, don't hold your breath. Given the exponential rise in junk email, it could become a full-time job to review each new email, resend it back with a REMOVE in the email Subject field. Congress could have opted for a smarter law (God forbids) which requires the spammer to write UNSOLICITED in the Subject field, or any clear indicator. I could activate my email filter, a feature most email applications have, to automatically move all incoming unsolicited messages to a folder for future review. Or better yet, I can zap each unsolicited message right on the spot. You would think it's my Constitutional right to refuse to read or listen to unwanted speech, but Congress does not think so.

But Congress's hidden agenda, one friend suggested jokingly, is to give the American voter a taste of their own medicine. One legislative assistance disclosed to me the horrors of the email revolution and how the avalanche of constituents' emails have exacted a heavy burden on Congressional staffers. The pre-web generation was frugal in its correspondence with its representatives and may have relied on a quick phone call or a mailed letter. With the traditional methods of correspondence, congressional staffers had to spend less time deciphering the constituent's position on an issue.

The cyber activist, on the other hand, is willing to fire an email to his or her representative as well as the other few hundred Members of Congress and the global media at the drop of a hat. It is left up to each Member to determine if the email sender is a bona fide constituent, whatever the issue of concern is, and the sender's position.

For some bizarre reason, many cyber activists do not consider the content of their emails worthy of the proofreading accorded to a mailed letter. Regardless of the email quality, I for one think it strengthens the democratic process by keeping elected officials more in tune with their voters.

Old-fashioned mass mailings are a costly and time consuming endeavors for the sender but are more convenient for the recipient. Mass email on the other hand is exponentially convenient for the sender but is such an incredible nuisance to the recipient. With plain old paper mail, the sender had to contend with material, weight, and labor costs. Quantity of mailed pieces was also a factor that contributed greatly to the mailing cost.

Since email, almost overnight, the above considerations vanished. There are no stamp costs, weight is no longer an issue, labor is minimal, and spammers are having a field day with the almost infinite quantity of emails they can send at a marginal cost. You and I know what that translates to: mountains of unsolicited email in our overcrowded inboxes.

The most annoying junk email variety is the X-rated. Typically, those emails arrive with a bogus From field and another fictional To field with a Subject field such as HOT! STEAMY! AND ALL YOURS! if you call a 900 number and charge it to your credit card. Last time I had the hot and steamy charged to my credit card, it was at Joe's Crab House. I used to think the adult junk emails I receive frequently were pranks initiated by friends or foes until it became apparent it is an international epidemic.

Equally annoying are the myriad of discussion groups I mysteriously become a member of. Without any advance warning, one day an email would land in my inbox with dozens of heated replies and counter-replies. Often the original post would read something like "Who thinks Clinton is innocent." But the last reply would degenerate into "You mother is so fat…" Unlike automated email lists, makeshift ones are hard to escape since each of the two dozen or so participants have to voluntarily remove my email address from their Copy To field.

It gets hairier when a friend keeps inundating my inbox with bad jokes. How does one break the news to a friend that the jokes are not funny without risking hurting someone's feelings in the process. A request to be removed from a friend's bad jokes list is akin to an indictment of his or her sense of humor. Just when you thought life is already complicated enough, netiquette adds another twist to it.

So I am slowly resigning to the notion junk email is an annoying fact of life not unlike constipation and housecleaning. The sooner I adjust, the less stress I shall have to endure. Besides, there is always a bright side to everything. Now when I receive a favor request via email from an unwelcome acquaintance, I can simply ignore it.

If I get chastised later for not responding, I can use the soon to be standard evasive maneuver of "I must have deleted your email by accident with other junk email. This junk email stuff is a pain." The typical response is often sympathetic to my plight.

To level the playing field with junk emailers and make it hurts where it counts, internet providers should levy a 10 cents charge-back per unsolicited email for every 1000 characters. With this disincentive-based formula, spammers will have less incentive to send more junk email. This brings us back to the former status quo which worked well to the consumers' advantage and rightly so.

(To register your protest over soft anti-spamming laws you can send an email to your Representative at http://www.house.gov/writerep)