The simple reason spam exists is because in all the millions of Internet users in the world, there are always sufficient numbers of them who are gullible enough to buy from spammers. And given that the cost of sending spam to the planet is minimal, you don't need many gullible idiots to make a profit.

There are several consequences of this for the rest of us. For one thing, spam consumes vast resources on the Internet which necessarily ends up costing us more than it ought. For another, it can overwhelm your mailbox and make reading legitimate email hard work. Here at Cyberpoint, for example, we receive several thousand spams per day.

It means that what ought to be one of the greatest social and business innovations of the 20th century is in danger of becoming distrusted and unreliable.

History records that the first ever spam was sent, ironically enough for a barely legal activity, by a firm of lawyers on 12 April 1994. Arizona-based Canter and Siegel, a husband and wife business, had their email access cancelled and immediately became the stuff of Internet lore. You can read a lengthy contemporary account here: The Infamous "Green Card Lawyers".

Spam takes its name from a Monty Python sketch set in a cafe in which every dish comprises multiple portions of Spam. The Hormel Corporation, which still makes and sells SPAM Luncheon Meat, takes a commendably philosophical view of it all. As long as you don't spell it with a capital "S" and you don't use a picture of a tin of SPAM Luncheon Meat to represent spam, you're okay. They even have material on Python-derived humour, such as the musical SPAMALOT.

The Internet industry has been working hard to stamp out this abuse for many years now. The reaction to Canter and Siegel was immediate and the same vigour is applied to spammers today. However, that effort is diluted by bone-headed politicians who don't understand the problem, nor how it should be dealt with, and attempt to pass laws in ignorance.

Here is a good example. A US Senator by the name of Frank Murkowski tried to pass a law that outlawed spam. But, at the same time, the bill attempted to define what was spam and what was not. One stipulation was that it would not be spam if there were a way of unsubscribing from the spammers list. It didn't stipulate that attempting to unsubscribe had to work, merely that a means had to be offered. How it never occurred to the good Senators that spammers would merely include the relevant text but never honour any requests is impossible to say. But that's not the whole story.

The attempt to pass this law failed. But to this day, some spammers include the wording anyway in order to make their spam seem legitimate and to fend off attempts to have them stopped. Step forward Senator Frank Hughes Murkowski and take your bow.

Another example of legislative incompetence comes from the UK where laws were passed that defined spam as being to a person's private email address. This sets out in law the concept that spam to a business email address is not, legally, spam. This is absurd. Another equally absurd idea is that the first unsolicited email is not spam, but that subsequent ones sent without consent would be. Now, how many spams do you ever see that come from the same address? Given that spammers routinely fake "From" addresses this is another bone-headed move that cannot do anything to solve the problem. On the contrary, it gives spammers more legal ammunition to foil moves to shut them down.

The final word should go to the US Supreme Court who in their decision in Rowan v. U.S. Post Office, ruled:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit. We categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even 'good' ideas on an unwilling recipient. The asserted right of a mailer, we repeat, stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."