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A: The act of sending unsolicited e-mail is known as a spam. Most often, spammers will use a distribution list associated with a special interest group instead of typing in individual names of recipients.

In one respect, trying to block this e-mail delivery is like asking the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver unwanted mail. You simply can delete mail you don't want, just as you have a trash can for paper mail. There is, however, another consideration for some users who accept Internet mail via a dial-up service: the cost of the line connection while the unwanted e-mail is being downloaded. In extreme circumstances, you can imagine the Sears catalog--delivered free via the postal service--being downloaded to your home PC, complete with graphics.

At the moment, you can't d o much except delete the message once you have received it. Most e-mail packages (particularly sendmail) will let you define a list of sites from which you will or will not accept e-mail. Unfortunately, while filtering can help, neither of these options is a true solution.

If you want to refuse e-mail coming from well-known spam sites, you can check out spam.abuse.net/spam. For ideas on how to implement sendmail-based restrictions, check out www.sendmail.org or www.mmgco.com/nospam.

If the problem persists, I wonder if this could ever end up with a shift in the way that users are charged for Internet usage. If users are charged per bit or byte to send mail--like the way people are charged per letter--perpetrators of unsolicited e-mail will be paying the cost of delivery themselves. Whether or not this idea would actually dissuade spammers is another matter. But at least the poor guy connecting to his ISP and downloading a bunch of unwanted messages would not have to pay for them.

Chris Lewis is vice president of international operations at ILX Systems. He is currently working in Europe. He can be reached at chrisl@ilx.com