Those heady dreams of a commercial Promised Land for the little guy were plausible before spam attained epidemic proportions. Now inboxes are jammed every day with so many unsolicited messages that it is getting hard to fish out the useful emails from the junk.

And legitimate businesses trying to reach out to customers among all those purveyors of porn and get-rich-quick scams are being drowned out and discredited by association.

Something has to be done, or the e-marketing dream for small and medium-sized enterprises will turn to ashes.

Whatever remedies are applied should be free of unintended side effects. In cracking down on spam, governments must avoid throwing the baby of legitimate business out with the bath water of bogus offers to solve your debt problems, to sell you Viagra without prescription, to enhance your anatomy, or to give you millions of dollars if only you will agree to put your bank account at the disposal of an unjustly persecuted Nigerian oil ministry official.

Yet that is exactly what much spam-fighting legislation does. Many countries are considering an "opt-in" regime barring the sending of unsolicited commercial communications by e-mail or other electronic messaging systems without the prior consent of the addressee.

The snag for legitimate businesses is that "opt-in" requires the prospective customer to know of the existence of the seller beforehand, removing any chance for a company to use e-mail shots to explore new marketing territory and enlarge its customer base. Thus the Internet is being robbed of its greatest charm for small businesses.

A second snag is that those dodgy officials in Nigeria, those snake-oil salesmen, those pornographers and those purveyors of illicit medication are scarcely likely to heed restrictive national laws. But legitimate businesses will always comply with the law. These laws risk being ineffective against spam while penalizing the law-abiding.

The trouble with "opt in" is that it fails to distinguish between legitimate commercial e-mail and spam. E-mail is ideal for telling customers and potential customers about product updates, new services and special offers. It is no different from traditional mailings to groups of people who are likely to buy a given product - say a subscription to a literary magazine, horticultural products, or domestic central heating. There should be no bar to approaching a prospective customer.

Reputable e-marketers conform to strict ethical rules, like the Code on Direct Marketing of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). They do not deserve to be lumped together with purveyors of spam, which may be defined as untargeted commercial e-mail from sources that disguise or conceal their identity, make fraudulent claims, purvey goods or services that are illegal or provide no genuine opt-out.

Is there any way to distinguish between the honest traders and the spreaders of the spam plague?

Legal requirements that direct marketing by e-mail or text messaging may not conceal or disguise the identity of the sender can be helpful. The same goes for the stipulation that such messages must also include a valid address to which recipients can send a request to be taken off the mailing list - an "opt out" provision.

Governments should avoid taking a blanket approach to spam, and analyse those aspects of e-mail messaging that are clearly objectionable to consumers and seek to outlaw or criminalize that activity. Then they should step up efforts to fight harmful spam by means of effective law enforcement.

There are no silver bullets, no easy solutions. The Internet poses its own special problems of jurisdiction and law enforcement. More thought is needed and business is ready to participate. Let common sense prevail.

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Maria Livanos Cattaui is Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce