Not so long ago, e-mail was an activist’s best friend — the quickest wayto tell 200 or so of your closest to “meet me in front of the legislature intwo days” or “meet me in Seattle in two weeks.” Lately, though, e-mail has gotten into the hands of the Other Side, and I don’t just mean e-newsletters from National Review Online.

This August, readers of the popular online alt mag ZNetwere a target for a new form of mailbox mischief, where e-mail messages seemingly sent by notable lefties would appear in the inboxes of ZNet subscribers — containing decidedly un-lefty sentiments. ZNet quickly caught on and warned their readers to think before they spammed back. (After all, would Noam Chomsky really mass distribute an anti-Palestinian rant?)

Although this particular conspiracy resolved itself quickly, the incident does make a person wonder about the e-vil potential of our seeming ally, e-mail.

In its wide-eyed days as a new and exciting medium, e-mail established a reputation as an informal, intimate and barrier-breaking form of communication. It combined the permanence and thoughtfulness of a letter with the ease and congeniality of a phone call. Even its format was more personal — your phone number is just a random collection of digits, but your e-mail address contains a scrap of identity: your name, where you work, your carefully crafted hotmail handle.

And it could all happen so fast. With a click of a “reply all,” you could address a whole committee; ccing âe” and the threat of the thoughtless forward âe” increased transparency. And firing off a note to [email protected] (or, er, [email protected]) became par for the course.

Then, as the pessimists amongst us knew it would, the bubble burst. “Free” e-mail came with advertising strings, the Web crawled with flashing, pop-up “buy me!”s, and your personal mailbox became a prime target for a new kind of insidious blanket advertising âe” spam.

In a recent report by Brightmail, a producer of anti-spam technology (yes, spam-fighting has become its own industry), spam now accounts for thirty-eight per cent of all e-mail traffic, up from just eight per cent last year.

Gone are the days when my inbox was filled with intimate messages from people I knew or strangers genuinely seeking me out. Instead, I find the relentless postings of robots, wasting hours of my time every week for the one-in-a-million chance that I might be interested in yet another no-fee credit card. This unprecedented bulk is a by-product of the medium itself: whereas the sheer cost of printing a billion flyers acts as a natural ceiling on print junk mail, low- to no-cost spam is limitless.

Why should we care? Am I being too sensitive? Does spam really mean us harm?

If you get as much spam as I do, you’ve probably already figured out that the daily penis enlargement and human growth hormone offers are playing on general societal insecurities rather than your particular groin or thighs. But, still, what does it mean that spammers have successfully privatized — claimed free ad space — in our personal computers? Is it unreasonable to not want my inbox to feel like Times Square?

Of course, the medium itself is not to blame but rather the people who abuse it. Perhaps another place worth pointing a finger is at the lack of legislation that enables the abuse to continue. In the U.S., the Direct Marketing Association is pushing Congress to pass legislation that would target deceptive e-mail, allow consumers to remove themselves from e-mail marketing lists and set penalties for marketers that violate the law. At least twenty-six states have already put their own legislation into action.

In Canada, where no laws currently exist to prevent abuse, the Canadian Marketing Association is lobbying for similar action from the provincial and federal governments. Yet it is not clear how seriously this petition is being taken, in light of a recent Industry Canada report that stated legislation was unnecessary. Reasons given include the fact that consumers have the choice of changing their provider if they are getting too much spam, Canada’s new privacy legislation should help guard against the buying and selling of personal e-mail lists– the lifeblood of spammers, and consumers could use the courts to defend themselves, through civil lawsuits or criminal charges, when the spam is illegal or fraudulent.

Oh, ya, like all the other sue.somethings who I’m regularly e-mailed with are going to join hands with Britney Spears to fight the fake Britney-endorsed merchandise offer.

Then again, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. This potentially revolutionary medium is as important to defend as other public spaces. While it’s almost tempting to abandon e-mail altogether and look for an alternative, the real coup would be to reclaim it.