It's hard to feel sympathy for a spammer, but I had to wince when I heard about what happened to Alan Ralsky. The Michigan-based spam king was the subject of a recent article in a Detroit newspaper. Now he is the subject of a huge anti-spam campaign launched by people miffed at his marketing.

It seems the Ralsky story was discussed on the Slashdot.org Web site, where someone came up with an idea: Let's send a spammer tons of junk mail and see how he likes it. In this case, we're not talking about e-mail, but the physical stuff: catalogs, brochures, sweepstakes come-ons, you name it. The Slashdot crowd signed Ralsky up for everything in sight.

The Spamhaus Project, which tracks these things from the United Kingdom, says that Ralsky is one of the top five spammers now operating. But he doesn't seem to like postal spam and is not happy about getting his mail delivered in bags. The latest word is that Ralsky has engaged a lawyer to sue the people sending him this stuff. Gee, do you think he has figured out that junk mail is a nuisance?

Meanwhile, I keep getting e-mail from people asking whether it's just their imaginations, or has spam really been on the rise? The answer, according to spam-screener Brightmail, is that spam has gone from 8 percent to 40 percent of all e-mail. You can expect to get roughly 2,200 spam messages this year, some of it come-ons for phony e-mail filters that actually make you a magnet for more spam.

Twenty-six states, including North Carolina, have set up curbs of one kind or another on unsolicited e-mail, but it's easy enough for spam operations to change location. And though good service providers do enforce anti-spam policies, a smart spammer can spread the messaging among multiple companies, keeping the daily traffic flow low enough to escape their notice.

On the federal level, it's heartening to report that the Federal Trade Commission recently sued six spammers, but note this: The feds can go after only illegal schemes. There are no federal laws on spam per se, so that if the messages that are plaguing you aren't fraudulent, but simply advertising, you won't get any help from Washington.

In some ways, spam has become the leading edge of technology. It's driving the fortunes of a new round of startups with technology designed to filter your mail. Among more established players, McAfee's SpamKiller (www.mcafee.com) is a solid tool for home users. BrightMail (www.brightmail.com) and 8e6 Technologies (www.8e6technologies.com) provide filtering options for business, often using special hardware built for the job.

What's dismaying about the anti-spam fight is how clever the spammers have become. One recent trick is to use an administrative feature in Microsoft Windows designed to send warning messages within a network. This isn't instant messaging, but a separate tool that tells users when the network is about to go down for maintenance.

Advertisers have figured out a way to use this feature to send bulk messages to random addresses. In fact, an outfit called DirectAdvertiser.com now sells a product that pops up ads to any computer configured to receive such service messages. America Online has just announced it is blocking this kind of spam, though as with viruses, it's only a matter of time before spammers find a new loophole.

The Internet was designed to route data around damaged servers, so it's hard to block every route into the system. Nor would we want to, given our belief in the free movement of information. But the tension between that freedom and our desire to be free of noxious marketers has never been more obvious than now.