In the carefree days before spammers ruined the Internet’s e-mail function by jamming users’ e-mail boxes with all manner of bogus get-rich schemes and dubious offers of cut-rate pharmaceuticals or hot stocks and bonds it was an excellent tool to communicate with friends and business contacts.

Now, though the capability to instantly touch bases with a neighbor down the street or a friend halfway around the world is still there – and without a surcharge (yet) by the postal service or the telephone company, if you can imagine that – the junk-mail crowd has taken all the fun out of the deal.

The spammers in-undate users’ cyberspace mailboxes daily and the average bear seems on the verge of throwing up his hands and saying the hell with it. Granted, he is not ready to actually sit down and write letters to his friends the old-fashioned way, via pen and ink. In this modern electronic age, that would be rank heresy. But his early fascination with the e-mail operation has withered in direct proportion to the rapidly spreading plague of spam, no doubt about it.

And who can blame him? Recently, after being off line for several days, I returned to find 162 messages in my e-mailbox. Eight of them were legitimate, from people truly wishing to communicate with me. The remainder were from boiler-room operations intent on forging some sort of permanent cash-cow pipeline to my Swiss bank account.

On Thursday, it was 49 e-mail messages, 48 of which were unadulterated junk. The night before that the score was: Legitimate Messages, 4; Scams and Schemes, 52. Some of the stuff is in Japanese, for which I am informed that I need to install special software to decode. As though that’s ever going to happen.

This proposition seems to me akin to having a telephone solicitor call collect to deliver his unwanted spiel. At an inopportune time, such as when it’s a tie ballgame, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth inning in the seventh game of the World Series, and a count of three and two on the enemy cleanup hitter.

Some spam e-mail arrives not in letters of the English alphabet, but in little hieroglyphic figures that sometimes look like a skirmish line of dung beetles marching across the screen, and at other times like a row of Army pup tents aligned on some military parade ground. God only knows what language those pitches come in. Sanskrit, maybe. Or bastardized Urdu.

In their eagerness to lure suckers into their dens, some spammers employ e-mail titles that, in their ambiguity, are too cute by half. Thus, huckstering for cheap patent medicines might present itself under the title, “Redneck wedding” say, or “CIA conspiracy.” The pitches invariably come from “Chuck” or “Marilyn” or “Jamal,” the senders apparently having been born without surnames, which is probably just as well.

But help is on the way. The Bangor Daily News, like many businesses, now has the capability of flagging and eliminating most spam before it even gets to users’ screens.

As I understand the short version, under a formula that only a dedicated computer geek could love, a Junk Quotient (my characterization, not the BDN’s) of “low” or “medium” or “high” is assigned to e-mail coming into the system. “Low” means the stuff may have some degree of interest to the recipient. “Medium” means less so. And “High” means forget about it.

System users are free to choose their poison, or have the BDN computer crew cut it off at the pass before it overwhelms their e-mail boxes. Since one man’s spam can be another man’s treasured literature, it’s a fine line to walk and the newspaper’s computer department is not unmindful of the potential pitfalls as controls are tightened.

The spammers, of course, love the challenge of working overtime to keep one jump ahead of the business world’s computer people, and vice-versa. Seemingly, one side no sooner gets a leg up than the other side devises some counter measure to foil the advance. It’s Dudley Do-Right vs. Snidely Whiplash, and it’s difficult to tell who’s ahead, even if a guy had a scorecard, which he doesn’t.

No matter. It’s enough to know that the good guys’ guerrilla warfare on the cyberspace junk mail continues in behalf of long-suffering Internet users everywhere. If things go well, perhaps their next mission can be the searching out and nuking of those sappy e-mail chain letters that urge recipients to forward the posting to 10 people within the next five minutes, or face seven years of unspeakably atrocious luck.

What a giant leap for mankind that would be.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.