I've been "whining and decrying" lately with respect to spam e-mail. And for good reason: Spam now accounts for more than half of all global e-mail traffic. By the end of 2004, it may well represent 75 percent of all e-mail communication.

There are reports of some businesses abandoning e-mail due to the high volume of daily spam received and the costs in software and time trying to filter out the junk.

Many people have dropped e-mail in favor of instant messaging; but that, too, is now being bombarded by "spim," or instant messenger spam. Researchers estimate 1 billion spims were sent in 2004, a number that is expected to quadruple by the end of 2004.

Anyone doing business online faces the spam dilemma. E-mail offers fast, economical, customer-focused access to the business. But spammers harvest those e-mail links and send thousands of junk messages to the addresses listed, ultimately hurting a company's ability to effectively and quickly respond to legitimate e-mail queries.

Pulling the e-mail links seems to defeat one of the reasons for being online in the first place.

Enter Luminatech (www.luminatech.com), a Bismarck-based application software and Web services firm with a clever spam solution: EClean.

Developed by Dave Reimer and Paul Engebretson, this new software allows you to maintain your Web site e-mail links while filtering spam messages from legitimate Web site correspondence.

It works by inserting a unique identifying code in the subject line of any e-mail specifically sent from your Web site. When you're ready to check your e-mail, you launch the EClean program which searches the messages on your e-mail server for the special code in the subject line. It also looks for senders and domains you've identified as "trusted," meaning e-mail you want to receive from sources outside your Web site.

The e-mail is then sorted, good from bad, and you get a chance to review messages that are suspected of being spam.

When you launch your regular e-mail program, your in-box will contain only those messages verified as being from your Web site or from trusted sources.

Once you're happy with the sorting process, you can set EClean to automatically delete all incoming spam.

While EClean requires an extra step in accessing your e-mail, it more than makes up for it by saving you the time and money you already spend weeding out e-mail gems from the junk.

It's a good spam solution for business or personal Web sites where e-mail links are an important part of the Web site. Visit the Luminatech Web site for more information on EClean.

There are, of course, numerous spam filtering programs and services available (with varying degrees of filtering success), but it's always worth highlighting those that are "home grown."

The efforts of Dave Reimer and Paul Engebretson remind us that Internet innovation and creative software development happens in North Dakota, too. In the digital world, it doesn't matter where you are - build a product that serves a need or solves a problem and the world will beat the proverbial path to your door.

Mott's new Web site

The city of Mott has a new community Web site: http://www.discovermott.com, launched just over a week ago. The site features information on area schools, city services, area recreation and hunting opportunities, economic development information, a city business directory and more. Take a look and learn a little more about Mott.

Daily weather data

A reader asks, "I'm trying to find out what the weather was like on certain days in the month of March 2004. Where can I find that out?"

If you're referring to the Bismarck area, you can find historic weather data at the North Dakota climate page on the National Weather Service Bismarck office Web site at http://www.crh.noaa.gov/bis/climate.htm.

Simply select the month you want and you'll get an imposing page featuring collected weather data for each day of the month. Keep in mind the information is listed as "unofficial data," so use it with care.

(Keith Darnay is the webmaster and designer for bismarcktribune.com. His Web site is at http://www.darnay.com/iec.)