Turns out the biggest problem in fighting the war against spam has been the giant battle lines drawn between all the participants. For the most part, marketers, email broadcast firms, ISPs, and filter program firms rarely speak to each other. We all heard that people on the "other side" thought of us as bad guys, and we focused on how to get around them.

In trying to stop the barrage of viagra ads and porno ad has unfortunately interfered with legitimate e-zine publishers, because we're caught in the anti-spam crossfire. If you publish any type of e-mail publication, there's a likely chance that your e-zine is NOT reaching a portion of your readers. Why? Their Internet service provider (ISP) or e-mail program uses a spam filter.

These software programs search for words and phrases that are typical of spam and assign each incoming e-mail a "score." If your e-mail has too many of these words and phrases, you receive a high score, and you may be blocked.

This of course is hurting my business as I publish several ezines but I think perhaps there is another issue here. The freedom to choose who I get email from. My isp is deciding not only who I can send to but who I get email from by some spam score system. I feel this violates my rights as an individual. I have a right to receive my mail. I am just as irritated as the next guy with the vigara ads and the porno ads, but in trying to filter these out we have given our rights as business owners and individuals to the isp's.

I for one do not want to have to check every email I send and see if for instance I have unsubscribe as a word in it. Especially when the anti-spam laws say I must give opt-in subscribers a way to un*subscribe. I also do not want to put in my address book the people I want mail from and then have someones spam filter look in my address book this is more an invasion of privacy than the spammers.

I think more communication between the isp's, ezine publishers, internet marketers is need. Call your isp tell them how much or how little you want to have filtered. My experience when I did this is they told me they have filters in place but they are not blocking me sending directly to the domain or are they blocking my incoming mail. One email box I have takes my spam and puts it in my trash folder that way I can go through it sort by spam scores and get the emails I want this is at least a acceptable scompromise between spam and me deciding who I want to hear from. Call your isp object to the filters, call your congressman or email him and object to isp's having the power to decide who you email and who you receive mail from.