Ken Rogerson is acting director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism at Duke University

Q. Several politicians are calling for a crackdown on spam, mass e-mail that come unwanted to millions of people. Assuming that all of these people don't want to invest in Nigerian oil, is there anything that can really be done about it?

A. In the spirit of the Internet as the Wild West, U.S. representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, has recently proposed offering a "bounty" to anyone who identifies a distributor of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), better known as spam.

The untamed realm known as the Internet does share some characteristics with the Old West, where vigilantes and bounties were sometimes used to try to tame the lawless frontier. But is spam a crime worthy of a bounty? It is certainly an extreme inconvenience. For example, during the first week of March 2003, AOL says it blocked a billion spam emails offering mortgages and organ enhancement, and AOL members used a new "report spam" button on their e-mail software 5.5 million times.

With so much about spam unsettled, including its precise definition, does it make sense to unleash cybervigilantes? Is it reasonable to expect young bounty-hunters in cyberspace to know the legal and ethical boundaries they might cross while tracking down spammers? And what happens if some of the deputized vigilantes turn out to have malevolent tendencies?

There are other approaches that offer better hope. Proposals have included a tax on each spam e-mail sent; fines for companies or organizations sending too much e-mail; and a national "Do Not E-Mail" database, similar to the "Do Not Call" database for telemarketers. These calmer approaches have failed to win sufficient support to date, often because of industry lobbying.

Technological solutions are also conceivable. Proposals include an e-mail architecture that would place encrypted tokens into each piece of e-mail to identify legitimate messages. As in many other policy arenas, though, there are questions about how a purely technological solution can be enforced.

One form of governmental anti-spam action that is working on a small scale is the Federal Trade Commission campaign against spam that commits fraud, an existing criminal act. You can forward any e-mail that you think is perpetrating fraud (the most well-known being the transfer of multi-millions of dollars to you from a Nigerian national) to uce@ftc.gov.

None of the proposals to fight spam offers a perfect solution, but of all the possibilities, offering bounties to random teenagers seems the most problematic. There is no guarantee that it would work. Furthermore, dangling $10,000 bounties in front of teenagers and then expecting them to know and honor the constitutional and legal limits on investigative powers is unrealistic. Individual rights could be trampled, and some young people could end up in legal difficulties themselves.

The vigilantes of the Wild West often took great pains to avoid accountability for their activities. Any government initiative to limit spam should not only hold spammers accountable, but also those who track them down.