Porn Spam? No Thanks, Ma’am: Click Open, Scan, Delete, Repeat

It was a quick getaway to the Pacific coast of Mexico, and a total escape from reality. For nearly a week I had no television, listened to no radio, didn’t read a newspaper. Most importantly, I didn’t get anywhere near a computer.

This is the only way to fly in the Information Age. You need rehab now and then, and it helps to go someplace where there’s salt on all the drinks, your e-mail can’t find you, and the only intrusion is from coconuts washing ashore. I was only taking messages that came in bottles.

So I get back to the office a new man, blood pressure down, the gray pallor gone. I fire up the computer, check the e-mail, and what do I find?

Waves of a different kind, crashing over the breakwater -- a relentless tide of unsolicited pitches to lower my mortgage and boost my manhood.

And porn. Lots of it.

Jessica wanted to know if I was looking for someone special.

Jordan wanted me to come check her out, and judging by the photos, it’s fair to say that Jordan is no wallflower.

“Are you still online?” Cyndy asked.

Susie wanted to know if I was free tonight. Would she still be interested, I wondered, if she knew I was such a prime candidate for penile enlargement?

“Hey,” asked Jill. “Remember me?”

No, as a matter of fact. With or without her clothes, I don’t remember Jill. Or Jennifer, for that matter, although she did look vaguely familiar. Before leaving on vacation, I think I spotted her in a barnyard scene that would have knocked 4-H clubbers off their milking stools.

You click open these messages, some of which are camouflaged as legitimate mail, and hope the boss doesn’t walk by while your screen is filled with a cavalcade of private parts, topped by a screaming headline, “Sexy Secretaries Waiting for Your Indecent Instruction.”

In one week, my unsolicited porn e-mail seemed to have gotten even more perverse. In one stretch, six straight e-mails arrived with photos to indulge every imaginable fetish.

Maybe it hadn’t gotten worse. Maybe I had just become so accustomed to daily visits from colonies of eager sex slaves, I needed to be away for a while to be reminded how raw and relentless this stuff is.

As a matter of fact, an expert told me, there’s more of it by the day. Spam -- unwanted e-mail solicitation -- is growing 20% a month, says Paul Judge of CipherTrust, a firm that sells anti-spam software and strategies.

Internet marketing is like a nerve gas that seeps into any crack. Unfortunately you can’t duct tape your e-mail in-basket. Porn will enter your office and find you at your desk.

You can kill a thousand messages and it only invites more.

You can write every foul word you remember from junior high into an e-mail filter, and it still gets through, all of it distant and, ultimately, deadening.

Click here for the “absolute horniest girls anywhere.” Click here for the “first and only interactive orgy web site.”

Here we are at the pinnacle of global communication science, and it’s being used to sign you up for a look at the “best butts in the biz.”

Now don’t get me wrong. Go ahead and have your interactive orgies, if that’s what does it for you, and put me down as a supporter of virtually all kinds of nakedness. Every red-blooded male is going to sneak a peek now and then.

But I don’t think the cause of humankind is advanced by bombarding every man, woman and child with unsolicited photos that would make a gynecologist blush. I’m almost tempted to send a donation to those hair circus televangelists who rant and rave on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. They might be right about the apocalypse.

Marty Kaplan of USC’s Norman Lear Center says it’s not just e-mail porn that threatens the republic.

“Have you listened to FM shock radio?” he asked. “It’s coarse beyond belief. There is no envelope anymore.... I mean, Howard Stern is quaint compared to the kind of stuff you can hear.... There has been a coarsening of our culture which is pretty near universal.”

While I was asking Kaplan what we can do about it, an e-mail popped up on his screen.

“It says, ‘Would you like a larger one, or for your spouse to have a larger one?’ I’m still trying to parse that.”

Your only hope to preserve the sanctity of your family and your right to privacy, Kaplan says, is to move to East Jerusalem, Oaxaca or Amish country.

Maybe. But if you take a laptop, Trish and her friends will find you.

“Hi, my name’s Trish,” she said in a message to me. “Yesterday was my 18th birthday, and guess what my parents bought me?”

Tickets to the opera?

“A new computer! The best part is, it has a web cam!!!”

Good thinking, Mom and Dad. The little darling’s on her way.

CipherTrust’s Judge, who chairs the Anti-Spam Research Group that met recently in San Francisco, says technology, consumer education and legislation can eventually vaporize a lot of unwanted e-mails.

But it’ll get worse before it gets better, he says, because spammers keep devising ways to get through. It’s so cheap to send mass e-mails, Judge says spammers can turn a profit if only five people in 500,000 respond.

Somebody let me know when the problem is solved. I’ll be on a beach in Mexico, waiting for a message in a bottle.

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.