Tired of sorting through endless spam e-mails filling your in-box despite the latest filters? You are not alone. A market-based solution might cure the problem.

Spammers like to send you and millions of your closest friends unsolicited e-mails. Some try to sell you unwanted products and services. Others contain unintelligible characters. Others are infected with viruses, worms, or worse. All are unwanted. And spam increasingly accounts for a larger share of email traffic.

There is no shortage of proposed solutions to spam. Most focus on more sophisticated spam filters with several commercial vendors offering products. These filters eliminate most but not all spam. Spammers react to new filters by developing more sophisticated means to evade them.

Moreover, filters sometimes unwittingly keep legitimate e-mails from reaching in-boxes where they are wanted. Some filters block e-mails based on a word in a subject heading or based on a distribution list, no matter how small.

Other proposed solutions focus on creating legal penalties for spammers. The illegality of spam, however, does not appear to deter spamming activities.

Still other proposed solutions suggest that Internet service providers or telecommunications carriers should charge a fee for originating emails, thereby discouraging frivolous messages. This solution would make sense if spam was clogging telecommunications networks, but spam is rarely a threat to network capacity. Also, network operators and ISPs do not yet charge for capacity usage for non-e-mail traffic, so why should a network carrier collect a fee for a 1 kilobyte e-mail but not a 50 megabyte file download?

Nor should e-mail senders necessarily pay AOL, AT&T, or other carriers a fee for a service that is incrementally costless to these carriers. If the service were costly to the carriers, presumably they would already and legitimately be charging for these services. Ultimately, pricing e-mails by network operators makes little economic sense when e-mails are not congesting networks.

The problem with spam is not so much that it clogs telecommunications networks as that it clogs your in-box. The economic solution, therefore, is to charge admission to your e-mail inbox.After all, spammers do not appear as desperate to clog telecommunications networks as they do to clog your in-box. Charging a price for e-mail to enter an in-box is the most efficient means to limit unwanted e-mails.

If every e-mail that entered your inbox had to pay you a one-cent admission fee, those e-mails from friends, family, and business colleagues would easily be received. But a spammer sending a message to a million addresses would not likely be willing to pay a one-cent charge ($10,000 for a million addresses). One could of course designate certain senders as having free access to your in-box, e.g., specific civic and religious organizations, an educational institution, or even specific online vendors.

Currently, there is no easy mechanism to charge admission to your e-mail in-box, but the absence is more institutional than technological. If there were a recognized market for admission to in-boxes, online financial intermediaries such as PayPal would reasonably develop means to service that market. The institutional difficulty is reaching a situation where e-mail senders reasonably expect to pay to send an e-mail, and e-mail receivers reasonably expect to be compensated for receiving an e-mail.

If spam were eliminated, many if not most Internet users would have relatively balanced e-mail traffic; they send roughly as many e-mails as they receive. For these users, a system of charges for admission to in-boxes would likely result in no net payments.

Individual Internet users could set different admission prices to their inboxes. Individuals who love receiving spam could set an admission price of zero, the current default price throughout the Internet. An e-mail address for a popular personality could set a price of $100 with proceeds going to a favorite charity. Most ordinary users would set a low but positive price (perhaps between half a penny and a nickel) to keep out spam. Legitimate businesses would develop to ensure that an online postage system would work seamlessly, much as online payments are made today.

The next time you are frustrated by spam, the solution may not be a better filter or a better law. Instead, the solution may be a simple pricing structure where you are paid for the privilege of receiving e-mail.

A former FCC commissioner, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. He can be reached at hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.