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NEW YORK - For some, blocking spam is easy. For others, it is almost impossible.
Bruce Grier, who uses e-mail mostly for personal correspondence, is one of the lucky ones. He's whittled his spam overhead down from 40 or so a day to almost zip.
He doesn't have any special equipment or software. Instead, he relies on his Internet service provider's filters and on stealthy behavior -- jealously guarding his main account and never posting it in a public place where spammers might get ahold of it.
"Spam has forced me to become smarter," said Grier, a home-improvement contractor in South Shore, N.Y.
Smarter doesn't help Larry Sribnick. Sribnick heads an elite five-member engineering company, HR Batteries Inc., which designs sophisticated battery systems for military and civilian applications.
He can't hide his e-mail address or keep it off Web sites, because e-mail is critical for winning new clients. And he doesn't trust filters, as even a minor glitch can dump an important last-minute design update into the garbage can.
Instead, an engineer who should be testing batteries for the latest Air Force Remotely Piloted Vehicle is stuck for a half hour a day throwing out ads for Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes. It's not something a secretary can do.
"It has to be someone who knows the business," he said. Besides, he added, "The porn is so bad that I'm not comfortable with having a female member of our staff do the job."
Between the two of them, Grier and Sribnick illustrate the difficulty of fighting spam. While nearly everyone agrees spam is becoming a major drain on users, the Internet and the economy -- $10 billion a year and growing -- what works for one person won't necessarily work for the other. What's more, the solutions can be expensive, time-consuming or simply beyond the technical skills of some users. Even with filters, some spam is bound to get through.
So how do you stop spam, or at least cut down on the flow?
"A multilayered approach is the right one," said Ken Schneider, chief technology officer of Brightmail, which makes spam-blocking programs for Microsoft Network, AT&T, EarthLink and Optimum Online. That means changing your behavior online, using the tools available from your Internet provider and maybe adding some software to your own computer.
Here's what to do:
"I have two e-mail services coming into my office," said Louise Cassano, owner of LuCas Communications in Levittown, N.Y. Her Juno account dates from 1994, and because it is well known and public, gets spammed 40 to 50 times a day. So she's relying more on an AOL account.
"This address is not given out to anyone other than business associates, which, I'm certain, keeps it somewhat sheltered."
"These things crawl over the Internet, messages boards, Web pages, etc. and look for e-mail addresses and report them back to the spammer," said Bryson Gordon of McAfee Security Inc., which sells anti-spam software.
The Rev. Alan Beagley of Williston Park, N.Y., reports, for example, that he gets a good deal more spam than his wife because he subscribes to public Usenet news groups, while she does not. "It does not waste a whole lot of time, but it is a nuisance," he says.
If you can't avoid posting your address, you can change your e-mail address to a form that fools a spider but not humans -- a process known as address munging. Thus JoeSmith@somewhere.com gets written as JoeSmith(at)somewhere.com.
Although some Internet purists disapprove, there's a detailed guide to munging at members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html#definition.
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