(b)

Carve into paragraphs each devoted to one topic. Add subheads to indicate your structure to a scanner.

People find spam annoying and unfair—an invasion of privacy, a waste of time, a distraction. Just deleting every piece of spam can take ten minutes a day. What can we do about this problem? Spam is unsolicited email, usually advertising get-rich-quick schemes, penny stocks, diets, or pornography, but sometimes publicizing a political or moral position.

We believe that everyone sending an email should be required to include a working return address. In the U.S. Congress, some proposed bills outlawing anonymous email would allow us to hit the Reply button and send back junk mail of our own. Spam, defined as email you didn’t ask for or want, might be discouraged by such a law, but not killed. We’d like to be able to reply to any spam saying, "Take me off your list." But when we try that, we often get a message back saying that the address cannot be found, because the Reply-To address was bogus. Although spammers don’t mind filling our inbox, they don’t like our complaints filling up their own server.

Another possible solution is filtering software. But it is difficult to anticipate every subject line that clever spammers might use, so that you can block those messages; and you will never be able to guess every made-up Sender the spammers might invent. Plus, the whole process of creating a Delete on Receipt list is time-consuming. So most people aren’t going to bother.

The Delete button still seems our best solution.