The latest report on spam is not a surprise to anyone who has used the same email address for oh, more than a week.

Nine out of ten emails are now spam.

Did you ever bother to count your phone calls? How many of those are telemarketers ignoring the do-not-call disaster?

While security providers on the web are concentrating on how to block spam and politicians (never accused of intellect) bothered their busy schedules long enough to fake a lip service bill to give false hope to telephone freedom, the solution has been waiting for someone to simply bring it up.

So I'll bring it up.

The solution to both unwanted telephone and email is within the technological grasp of every single telephone company and Internet Service Provider. Right now.

Its called: (ok, so I made this up but it does have a ring to it) P.A.S.S. The Permission Access Security System.

And since I was just informed that I won $10,000 and deleted it before it bothered to load most of its garbage images (the latest 'how to overcome filters' trick), this takes on a far more immediate need. Of course that email is now in my 'junk' list and will wind up in my 'junk' folder the next time it is sent but I STILL have to delete it and the dunce sending it never suffers any consequences.

Cell phone companies now let you have a 'circle' of numbers they call 'friends' to call for free or reduced rates.

Email passes through ISP's like it didn't matter and is sent to specific accounts.

All it would take is for a filter to be run BEFORE the mail is placed in your account. Not after it is sent to you.

All it would take is for a phone number to be filtered BEFORE it is sent to your phone line; not hope the schmuck making the call is bothering to pay a single bit of attention to the rule of law (that's another topic for later).

Here is how it works.

When you sign up for an Internet account, you receive an email address. You should have an online utility to visit BEFORE you can receive any email in that account. Everything is banned until you say otherwise. And to do that, you just enter the email address you want to receive mail from. That solves permission marketing as well. When you sign up for a newsletter just add their email address to your PASS list. When you send mail to someone that address is automatically added to your PASS list. If you send mail you obviously want a reply.

With your phone, just enter the number you will take calls from into your phone's utility and PASS allows that number to call you. If you call a number that number is automatically entered into your PASS list so they can call you back.

Or don't bother with the manual list set up at all. Just send an email to place that address on your PASS list. Or call a number to place that number in your PASS list.

No big commercial business investment. No big super-duper useless fiasco called a law, nobody will respect anyway.

PASS gives you control over what you are paying for and does not have to be approved by the Telemarketer's Associations (ie: it would take that to become a law everyone would ignore anyway.)

Another nice thing about PASS is the list it creates of the rejected numbers and email addresses. Your ISP could set a limit on a specific address. Get listed more than one time in the 'rejected' list and no one will ever see your email again. And each email 'rejected' is returned to send undeliverable. Let the spammers deal with the overload.

Telephone companies would maintain a PASS rejection list of phone numbers. One rejection and wham... no more phone number to be rejected with.

Of course, ‘one' may be a bit stingy but I just received an email wanting to know if I wanted to be more of a real man. I didn't know I wasn't.

And of course, there will be those spammers who lock onto an email address they know is permitted and fake the address in their spam messages. All that takes is to parse the email header and save the 'Message-ID' line. You see, the useless spammer who sent me 'man' attempted to report their source as one thing, but the ID places it as another. If an email is potentially faked it should be stopped BEFORE it reaches PASS.

Now. Will anyone do anything about PASS? (Here comes the pessimism.) No.

Not only will no one read this who could do anything about it, but no one really cares about spam or telemarketers in places of influence where someone caring could do something about it.

If they did care, someone would have already created PASS and it would already be an agreement with all ISP's and telephone companies to deploy it. Stress levels would drop immediately but so would the funding for massive security band-aids and we can't have that, can we.

There is a whole 'anti-spam' industry. PASS would wipe that out, except for the company smart enough to write this code for both email and telephone use but the chances of the company reading this and that one person who cares actually runs that company, are so small I'll just go back to deleting the solution to helping me eat less. "How many times did you get unhappy after noticing you keep ordering pizza after pizza? 0be*sity does not only affect the way you look and feel about yourself."

You see that little '*'? That little thing defeats the industry. Go figure. "Office 2007 is available for enterprise users from..." And the spam just keeps on comin!