TAIPEI, Taiwan -- A middle-aged office worker Don Quixote in Taipei is charging a colossal Internet windmill.

"I know I'm Quixotic," admits a father of two teenage daughters, who identifies himself only as Mr. Chen. He refers to his war on pornographic e-mails.

Chen began battling it out with Goliath on November 18.

Practically every PC user in Taiwan finds his or her e-mailbox full of unsolicited porn messages, sometimes with pictures and illustrations attached, almost every day.

"You know," the worried father says, "I can't let my daughters look at them." He also knows many worried fathers like him.

So Chen sent his first e-mail with the junk mail attached 20 days ago to Mao Chi-kuo, minister of transportation and communications; Peng Yun, chairwoman of the National Communications Commission; and Lu Shyue-ching, chairman of Chunghwa Telecom.

Four more Chunghwa Telecom executives and an NCC commissioner also received Chen's message together with pornographic e-mails.

He has never ceased to send his e-mails in an all-out attempt to solicit assistance in stemming the flood of unwanted e-mails. Without any encouraging response, however.

"If no positive response is coming," Chen threatens, "I'll take it to President Ma Ying-jeou."

Even if President Ma wants to help, it's next to impossible to stop pornographic or other unwanted commercial e-mails.

"Minister Mao has acknowledged receipt of Mr. Chen's e-mails," an MOTC spokesman says. The ministry has jurisdiction over telecommunications.

Mao has the case referred to Chunghwa Telecom, his aide adds. That means the buck has been passed to the Internet service provider. Chunghwa Telecom runs Hinet.

Can Chunghwa Telecom do anything to help?

Well, a top executive says it's the job of the NCC to control e-mail exchanges. The buck is passed again.

The NCC has proposed a bill to amend the existing commercial electronic mail act. The amendment has yet to be adopted by the Cabinet. Then it will have to go to the Legislative Yuan for enactment.

It takes time. And when the act as amended goes into force, there are no guarantees that spam can be prevented.

Under the proposed act, spammers may be required to pay from NT$500 to NT$2,000 per message in damages to angry recipients.

Senders are required to identify the original writers of the spam, who may be fined up to NT$200,000.

To punish senders as well as originators, victims must resort to class action litigation. For instance, they may ask Consumers' Federation to sue on their behalf as a class of victims.

The problem is that the culprits may be found, but they may continue to send by changing their identity.

They can easily resume operation through phishing, which is the criminally fraudulent process of acquiring sensitive information such as user names, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Communications purporting to be from popular social Web sites like YouTube and Facebook, auction sites, online banks, online payment processors or IT administrators like Yahoo and ISPs are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting.

Of course, angry recipients may acquire firewall programs which are expensive but not very effective.

As a matter of fact, about 10.1 billion junk e-mails are sent a month in Taiwan. On an average, each PC user receives 100 spam messages a day.

A user has to spend 30 hours a year to erase all the spam, wasting NT$3,000.

Currently, there are 15 million users. They lose altogether NT$45 billion (US$136 million) per annum.

The only option open to all angry spam victims is to set up a firewall for any and all the electronic messages. It can be easily done, though they must tell all concerned they are not going to receive any e-mail at all.

Should everybody build that firewall, the entire e-mail network across the world would become history.

This story was first published in The China Post on 8 December 2008.