I’ve excerpted this e-mail on the Friday mailbags, here’s the whole thing. Readers like Mr. Davis are one of the upsides of this columnist gig, his perspective on the cost of doing business of unsolicited e-mails and faxes, not only in time and aggravation but the accompanying cost in quality of customer service, is provocative.

Hello David:

I really enjoyed your article...

I personally feel that this sort of issue is a difficult thing to deal with but would love to see the unsolicited FAX and call scenario go away.

I am a "small business owner" in Palm Springs, CA, and I find that both are real drains on resources for a small company. I must get 250 unsolicited FAXes a week; no way to determine how many unsolicited sales calls. I have always hated having to talk to an unattended answering system but in all honesty, it does eliminate much of the unsolicited calling.

While I would far rather have a live person answering my phones, I have given in and moved in that direction instead of having a pleasant, reasonably intelligent human being answer the phone just because of the quantity of unsolicited calls. I feel I have tried everything I can legally try to get by them. It costs me about 6 employee hours a week to "try to get off" the FAX lists, by calling the remove numbers, not to mention the toner, ink and paper.

All of us that have ever depended on FAX machines for business have tried the FAX servers but that technology has a substantial cost to it as well, and has never been very reliable.

The current laws are a joke and have no teeth whatsoever. This [proposed law outlawing all unsolicited faxes] would be a wonderful change but all the laws on the books really mean nothing until something is done to enforce them.

E-Mail is in worse shape as it is the new means of business communication. Up until about 2002, we used to get about 700 FAXes a week that were legitimate forms of communication. Now, I get about 50 legitimate and 250 illegitimate. It is hardly worth the effort and expense of a dedicated FAX line and all that goes with it. FAXes will soon go away altogether.

If the spoofing and spamming in E-Mail does not cease soon, the usefulness of E-Mail, as we know it now, will be questionable. I again must pay someone at least minimum wage for 2 to 3 hours a day to deal with all the junk that slips into our system, AFTER it has been filtered and computer handled. It seems that it should be easy for the government to control this but politics being what it is, seems to only cloud the water. Perhaps you will be able to research and do an article on finding and intelligent way to handle the E-Mail problems.

I own a small computer and computer service business. It is a family owned business and we have been here for 30 years. We do mostly repairs, custom installations, networking, support, custom equipment and some sales.

One of the negative factors of all of this is that by having to compromise on something as simple as answering a phone, often confusion and uncertainty causes problems, for both the business and for the customer.

Not being able to just simply communicate is a real negative in the business world where customer contact is imperative. Even cell phones now are subject to mass solicitation. It seems that would be easy to control but the communications industry looks the other way and asks the government to do the same. Most of the time, they do.

However, a business must draw the line somewhere and try to work within the boundaries made since we can expect no assistance from the goverment. Where 2 or 3 out of every 5 calls to a business is a solicitation, productivity of employees grinds down.

The same is true for E-Mail. Our guess is that 25 out of every 30 into our domain are junk. At best we electronically stop 13 or 14 out of 30. The rest must be handled or take the chance of an important loss or answer being tossed. It does not make sense that 99.9% of the businesses in the US must pay for junk E-Mailers to operate within the US. And my best information is that the US is only a small fraction of the source for junk and spam worldwide.

It is a sad commentary to say that about a third of the IT budget, small companies or large, is spent fighting and avoiding outside, uninvited intrusion such as FAXes, phone calls, spam, junk mail ad E-Mail, adware and spyware, and viruses. Think how efficient data processing, not to mention businesses in general, could be without all that nonsense.

I have been in the computer industry since cutting my teeth on IBM 360s, Data General Novas and DEC octal machines in the early 60s. There have been good companies and those that were not so good. Others, such as IBM and Microsoft have had a significant impact on our world, not just the computer industry. Microsoft is obviously huge and huge companies are ALWAYS the targets of bashing. They don't do any more for me than they do for anyone else in the industry but it really bothers me to see all of the bashing of Microsoft.

We would have no industry without them! They didn't cause the problems, certainly not these though they are tried and convicted of it daily; and as I see it, they are no more "unfair" in business ethics than most businesses in all other industries. They have provided a very good product in the industry for a very reasonable end user price. I paid $10,000 for my first Nova OS, XP Pro is $300 45 years later. Considering inflation over the years, it is practically a gift!

Although the computer industry has continued to advance technology and lower prices, that cannot continue if this nonsense of the government avoiding the responsibility of "doing the right thing" when it comes to controlling abusers of the communications in the country fails to change.

Is it a small problem? Yes and no. It is a small segment of the business world but in dollars, it is huge and it is THE eroding factor for what is right and wrong in business in general. It seems to me that 50 years ago, ethics mattered and doing "wrong" was a rarity. Now much of business as a whole is based on intentionally skirting the issues and riding a very fine line between right and wrong.

The communications industry SHOULD be the ones policing themselves; the computer industry should do the same. Instead both are leeches on all of businesses that MUST use them.

Sorry about unloading but this is an UGLY aspect of business. Good luck and thanks again for the article.