Ever had your phone ring and then when you picked it up, it went dead? It may have been a fax spammer's collection technology which dials numbers seeking fax machine responses. When they get the fax signal instead of a human (or voice mail) they add the number to their database and sell it to other spammers.

The fax spam problem is now turning into an email spam problem because so many people use email accounts to receive digitized faxes these days. Jeff Adelman, VP General Counsel of J2 Communications (which owns emailed fax systems eFax and J2.com) grouses,"Every day we get hit by this. It's a huge problem" Not the least because recipients like me (see my 11/16 blog) think it's eFax that's spamming us when this stuff shows up in our email in-boxes.

eFax is fighting back aggressively by collecting as many offender faxes as possible and reporting them to the FCC. Plus this month they are unveiling a new Web page that eFax and J2 customers can use to report unsolicited faxes. Bravo!