I remember how, a few years ago, friends would whine about the amount of junk e-mail they received. They hated spammers. HATED them. And I'd be thinking, what's the big deal? One or two messages a day -- just delete 'em.

Well, now I get more than my own share of spam, and I understand the problem. When the signal to noise ratio falls below a certain point, one just wants to scream. I receive a great many legit e-mail every day which have to be answered (and, as I've noted here before, I don't answer it, anyway) and twice as much junk e-mail. So, like many others, I've started creating a set of spam filters to presort as much of it out of my e-mail box as possible.

The rules vary from keywords (is the word 'Viagra' in the subject line?) to IP address blocking to phrase matching (is there anything in the body about how the e-mail is sent in strict compliance with US Senate resolution blahbitty blah, blah, blah?). Some days, my spam filter manages to keep the load pretty manageable. Other days, I have to thwart the spammers filter thwarting.

Recently, however, I added a rule quite by mistake. I'd intended to block a certain overused phrase that only appears in spam, but due to an error (a short between the keyboard and the chair), the rule came out as: any e-mail with the word "click" in it is to be treated as spam.

As it so happens, the word "click" doesn't actually appear all that often in non-spam e-mail... except when it's appended to the end of the message by certain web-based e-mail hosts (msnmessenger, hotmail, yahoo). The word is often included in messages from web hosting affiliates of mine, as well. As a result, I'd been missing a few key e-mails these past few weeks. Then again, the number of spam e-mails that actually made it to my Inbox was tiny, tiny, tiny. That, alone, should have tipped me off that there was a problem, but so many other legit messages made it through, it simply didn't occur to me to check.

So I've gotten that problem all sorted out. But now I'm wondering, is there anything similar I can do to filter out unwanted telemarketing calls? (Sorry, that's redundant. "Unwanted telemarketing," I mean.) Anonymous CallID blocking isn't enough.

Any thoughts? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?