Prosecute
One of the best ideas in the cover story on spam (Can the spam, April 18) is to require all business emails (not just mass mailings) to provide a valid return address. The worst non-spam offenders, ironically, are ISPs and other internet-based businesses (such as Telewest, Blueyonder, UKReg and PayPal) who force even their own customers to use web-forms to contact them, then send vague and irrelevant replies from invalid email addresses that bounce, so we can only respond by going back to the web-forms.

UK company law already requires companies to publish their registered office addresses; it needs to be updated for modern communication to require all businesses that use the internet to publish email addresses.
Adam Funk
jfunk@co.umist.ac.uk

Defend
I take offence at you slating Hotmail: "Whether filtering is as aggressive as AOL's or as feeble as Hotmail's." Hotmail has by far and away the best filtering facility, which is to segregate email into folders based simply on the sender. If the sender is not in your Address Book or Safe List, then it gets put in a junk mail folder, otherwise it goes to your Inbox. This wholly removes spam, and allows you to review other email by looking at the junk mail folder.

Also, the claimed $200-a-year cost of spam email is ridiculous. Very few people use their work email address or "real" ISP email address when registering online. In addition to this, if they used Hotmail, they would be able to filter properly. Finally, you have to be online to read Hotmail, as it's an internet email service, therefore removing any cost per email statistic anyone cares to dream up.
Simon Morris
sjpmorris@hotmail.com

People's court
I find my solution to the problem of spam extremely efficient. I simply open a new folder that filters all the addresses in my address book. If I see new mail in this folder, I know it is from somebody important; if I see mail in my Inbox I know, at least, who it is not from, and treat it as a low priority accordingly. Spam cannot get into the new mailbox, as it will only take mail from the addresses you personally specify. Alex Marsh
alexjpmarsh@yahoo.co.uk

Exhibit A
I was not surprised in the least to read of Jack Schofield's junk email problems on Hotmail. I have never mailed anyone from my Hotmail address, and I opted out of a listing in the directory. Yet my Hotmail inbox is flooded with spam. Following Microsoft's instruction to set the spam filter to "high" does little to alter the volume of spam.

My Yahoo email address, on the other hand, receives hardly any spam at all, perhaps two or three per month. Nor do my Bigfoot and private domain addresses. Either Hotmail is poor at filtering spam or Hotmail is actively selling my address to spammers.
Jon Fox
jfoxhome@yahoo.co.uk

Jury's out
It's getting worse - spammers are now also faking the Reply-To: or Errors-To: lines, so they don't get the mail floods of rejections from the out-of-date address lists they use. Someone has done this for a non-existent address in my domain twice now, each time resulting in a flood of about 30,000 rejection messages from various mailer programs around the world.

Fortunately I'm on flat-rate internet access on a fairly fast line, and my ISP allows me to reject messages for unknown addresses without a full download, but this kind of thing could easily be crippling for a small business.
Dr David A Allsopp
daa@tqbase.demon.co.uk

Judge Jack
The hypothetical costs in the EU spam study are pretty ridiculous. Who in their right minds would tolerate an email system that brought them 20, let alone 60, spams a day without doing something systematic about it?

I speak with some experience, having gone back to an email address I hadn't used for two years and discovered 2,800 messages (35MB) - the vast majority being spam.

That underlines one major point about spam: it gets worse the longer an address exists (that one was around 18 years old) for obvious reasons - the address circulates and gets resold many times. So the easiest way to stop spam when it becomes a problem is simply to move.

But when it starts to be a problem, most people put in junk filters which cope with the vast majority of cases -it's obviously better if these are with the ISP but then people are getting faster network connections so the download time isn't always the problem.

I prefer setting up my own filters and stay away from systems that try to design them for me. My impression is that it does stop "a significant amount" of spam. I get very little real spam these days - but that's for many reasons, including ISP security.
Chris Moss
chris.moss9@ntlworld.com

Blog booked
Thanks so much for featuring my site, Rebecca Pocket (www.rebeccablood.net), in Web watch (April 18). However, I would like it to be noted that my site is not, in fact, built around my upcoming book, the Weblog Handbook; rather, the book exists as a result of the site. I was asked to write the book by an editor who is a reader of my site, which I have been maintaining for three years. Rebecca Blood
rebecca@rebeccablood.net