E-mail is such a communication panacea that few would like to forgo it willingly. Many of us remember with a tinge of nostalgia those innocent days when we opened our mailbox and found only replies to our letters to Aunt Sally, Uncle Bob and the kids.

No longer.

Yours truly, who considers himself only a small fry in the e-mail world, now gets on average 20 junk mails every 12 hours, offering super solutions to a wide variety of problems that I am told behove me to look into: I need to slim at least 20 kilos to look presentable again (actually, I weigh only 64 kilos) and also that some of my equipment is not only just too small, it usually malfunctions. And this is why all girls laugh at me.

Luckily, via the junk mail, I get to learn of a doctor who can prescribe Viagra on the Web and I can get my equipment functioning properly again. Then there are the daily and very tiring attempts to seduce me, in the raunchiest of languages, to subscribe to some girly photo-movie outfit.

I am by no means a prude, on the contrary, but a daily dishing up of what is a very enjoyable pastime in the most banale of languages is just too much to bear. Even for yours sincerely ... and that is quite something.

Actually, the novelty has long worn off and, like most of us hapless e-mailers, I too have to grin and bear it when I find my mailboxes clogged with junk mails and blocked to important mails. Again.

The problem is getting worse every day, despite allegedly clever blocking programmes.

One way to get around the junk mail problem would be to charge for each e-mail sent. Even a few euro cents each would stop those guys with mailing lists with five million or more names.

Then there is the hacking and virus problem. It is inconceivable that Microsoft has persisted with operating systems that have eight or more ports open for anyone come in and have a look. The sad thing is that Windows XP has been launched relatively recently and nothing substantial can be done till the next launch, a few years away.

As for virus designers and distributors as well as slanderers, subversives, anti-establishment guys, owners of bomb making Web sites etc. they would be stopped in their tracks as long as an indelible identifier is included in each e-mail and web posting.

"Infringement of the First Amendment" I hear angry Yanks shouting. No, not really. Freedom of expression? Sure, but then with the name of the "expressionist" attached, in a way that is at least traceable by the law. Few newspapers are prepared to publish anything without knowing the name, address and often the phone number of writers of letters to the editor, so why should the WWW (World Wide Wait) be different?

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