A frustrating cost of doing business: Nothing to lose, lower monthly payments, multiple times a day, small blue pill, prepare to save ...

I do not like it, "spam"-I-am Ten years ago when I graduated from college, I had never seen an e-mail. I certainly never imagined my job would involve looking at well over a thousand of them a week. Or that I would be using my college degree to delete e-mail and view (more like try not to view) pornography.

In my first year at The Kansas City Star, I started my Monday mornings by returning a couple of voicemails, maybe responding to a note on my chair. (Remember those?) E-mail was still months away. And I wasn't yet handling letters to the editor. Now I start my week by staring at 400 or 500 e-mails and wondering where my life went wrong.

How did this happen? And what can we do about it?

It's not hard to explain how it happened. Like telemarketing and junk mail, "spam" obviously works. If it didn't, there wouldn't be billions of them turning up in in-boxes as you read this.

And the truth is, there's not much we can do about it. "Spam" is an annoyance, a drain on my productivity, a problem for my employer ... and it's not going away.

My e-mail address is posted prominently on our website, and it's on many others. I'm a prime target for "spam" I don't pretend to understand how it all works, but being a forum for opinions apparently is just asking for it. I get as much of it as anyone in the company.

In addition to your run-of-the-mill "spam"--the "Your Degree May Be Closer Than You Think" ads, the porn, the oh-so-urgent pleas to help get money out of Africa--I get a lot of what one of our NCEW colleagues called "spampinion." (My favorites start something like this: "Dear newspaper editor, Why won't you tell the truth about ... ?")

This is the worst kind because I actually have to read them to be sure they're not legitimate letters to the editor.

I probably average between 1,000 and 1,200 e-mails a week. In a typical day, 30 of them might be legitimate e-mail submissions (in addition to maybe 20 "snail mail" candidates)--a reminder that e-mail is, at its best, a substantial part of a letters editor's toolkit. At the same time, more than 80 percent of the letters are "spam." This puts me on pace to hit the delete button almost 50,000 times this year. I think I'm going to need a new finger.

I've tried blocking specific senders. This is relatively easy to do with the e-mail software I've used. But you have to identify the offenders and manually enter their e-mall addresses one by one. These addresses, of course, are moving targets. So to be effective, you have to manage this filter regularly.

Most new e-mall programs also include other filtering capabilities. But filtering for content can be problematic. Particularly for a letters editor. Readers use profanity in their correspondence with us. They use phrases like "lowest rate available" "work at home" "you may have won" and "enlarge your...." Our systems managers resisted installing a "spana" filter on the Star's e-mall server in part because of First Amendment concerns.

But the hue and cry for a filter eventually got so loud that they installed one that rejected e-mail with words and phrases common to "spam" That was this year. It was a short-lived experiment.

Staffers were outraged. They couldn't get their work done. Personal e-mail was getting blocked. Things were getting lost in cyberspace and turning up days later, or never. And most of the "spam" was still getting through.

So the filter's still running, but it scans only subject lines. (A compromise.) As far as I can tell, whatever it's blocking has more than been made up for by the increase in "spam."

Our systems managers also monitor e-mail "logs" for large volume from specific senders. This is helpful, but it's a bit like closing your window after half a swarm of bees has entered your house. And as soon as you close one window, the bees find another opening.

The Star pays for "spam" It pays in bandwidth, in lost productivity, in equipment and software, and in the time spent by our computer staff dealing with the problem.

My "spam" problems have been exacerbated recently by the inability of our e-mail server, three years old now, to keep up. More employees are using e-mail, and the volume of messages has exploded. To replace it, the hardware alone will cost the Star $30,000.

If there is light at the end of the tunnel, I don't see it. Content filtering, at least for newspapers, is not the answer. And I don't foresee advertisers losing their incentive for sending "spam." At perhaps $100 for a million e-mail messages, they don't have to hook too many fools to make it worth their while.

Legislation, though well-intentioned, seems unlikely to work. The cost of enforcement boggles the mind.

There are some "third party" providers an individual or company can hire to block every incoming e-mail until the sender replies with proof he or she is a real person. (Computers can't do that.) Aside from the cost, though, senders may be offended by such automated requests.

When I've tried to e-mail letter writers and been asked to do this, I've thought twice about bothering. If I had to do this a hundred times a day, I wouldn't.

We can filter "spare." We can make it a crime. We can curse it all we want. But, barring some innovation, I think for journalists it's just a part of doing business, like carpal runnel syndrome and deadlines and stress.

It's like a chronic health problem that crept up on us. By the time we decided to do something about it, it was too late. We can take some medicine, exercise, change our diet. But it's never going to go away.

I guess it could be worse. Unlike a health problem, "spam" won't kill you. At least they haven't come up with that kind yet.

Lajean Keene is letters editor for The Kansas City Star. E-mail [e-mail]