Hurray for Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft Corp. The three giants of e-mail are forming an unlikely triumvirate to assault the huge problem of unwanted mass e-mail, commonly called spam.

Drek would be a more accurate nickname for it. This useless cyber pollution now accounts for up to 40 percent of the e-mail coming into business' e-mail queues. It costs an estimated $10 billion in employee time spent deleting the stuff and lost computer bandwidth.

The three techno computer giants, who have more than 200 million e-mail accounts among them, are proposing to share software to come up with better e-mail filtering programs. They have a winning idea there, but it won't be an easy fight.

Anonymous mass mailers are liable to do what they have done in the past, effectively wrapping themselves in the defenses of free speech and free enterprise.

May that defense finally crash and burn in court. Spam should be put on a par with porn, which is not protected under the Bill of Rights.

To get around any questions of constitutionality, computer users should be given the option of setting up effective spam filters for a small extra fee. Those willing to wade through the unsolicited e-mail or who find it amusing could have unfiltered service at a lower cost, leaving spammers with no defense.

The real question is, though, why the big three ISPs have taken so long to address the issue. Spam was a hated by-product of e-mail almost as soon as the World Wide Web went live 10 years ago. Nicholas Graham, an AOL vice president, said the companies were "driven to this point by our members," and that "we recognize spam is out of control."

That realization may be a decade too late for a technical solution. Spammers are nothing if not wiley. Anything the ISPs have done, spammers have done better, repeatedly defeating filters and blockers.

An idea out of the California Legislature could work: Put a bounty on spammers in hopes of enticing clever hackers to track them down for a reward. As appealing as this cyber Wild West idea might be, it could create as many problems as it solves. The most effective solution to this issue lies with individual computer users, and it's free:

No one should buy anything from a spammer; reply to a spammer or even open spam e-mail. The most powerful weapon against spam is still the delete key.