Brightmail, a vendor of e-mail filters and anti-spam applications warned that close to 5 million spam "attacks" or "bursts" occurred last month and that spam has mushroomed 450 percent since June last year. PC World concurs. Between one seventh and one half of all e-mail messages are spam - unsolicited and intrusive commercial ads, mostly concerned with sex, scams, get rich quick schemes, financial services and products, and health articles of dubious provenance. The messages are sent from spoofed or fake e-mail addresses. Some spammers hack into unsecured servers - mainly in China and Korea - to relay their missives anonymously.

Spam is an industry. Mass e-mailers maintain lists of e-mail addresses, often "harvested" by spamware bots - specialized computer applications - from Web sites. These lists are rented out or sold to marketers who use bulk mail services. They come cheap - c. $100 for 10 million addresses. Bulk mailers provide servers and bandwidth, charging c. $300 per million messages sent.

As spam recipients become more inured, ISP's less tolerant, and both more litigious - spammers multiply their efforts in order to maintain same response rate. Spam works. It is not universally unwanted - which makes it tricky to outlaw. It elicits between 0.1 and 1 percent in positive follow ups, depending on message. Many messages now include HTML, JavaScript, and ActiveX coding and thus resemble viruses.

Jupiter Media Matrix predicted last year that number of spam messages annually received by a typical Internet user is bound to double to 1400 and spending on legitimate e-mail marketing will reach $9.4 billion by 2006 - compared to $1 billion in 2001. Forrester Research pegs number at $4.8 billion next year.

More than 2.3 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages this year. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages by 2005. An average communication costs spammer 0.00032 cents.

PC World quotes European Union as pegging bandwidth costs of spam worldwide at $8-10 billion annually. Other damages include server crashes, time spent purging unwanted messages, lower productivity, aggravation, and increased cost of Internet access.

Inevitably, spam industry gave rise to an anti-spam industry. According to a Radicati Group report titled "Anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering market trends 2002-2006", anti-spam revenues are projected to exceed $88 million this year - and more than double by 2006. List blockers, report and complaint generators, advocacy groups, registers of known spammers, and spam filters all proliferate. The Wall Street Journal reported in its June 25 issue about a resurgence of anti-spam startups financed by eager venture capital.

ISP's are bent on preventing abuse - reported by victims - by expunging accounts of spammers. But latter simply switch ISP's or sign on with free services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Barriers to entry are getting lower by day as costs of hardware, software, and communications plummet.

The use of e-mail and broadband connections by general population is spreading. Hundreds of thousands of technologically-savvy operators have joined market in last two years, as dotcom bubble burst. Still, Steve Linford of UK-based Spamhaus.org insists that most spam emanates from c. 80 large operators.

Now, according to Jupiter Media, ISP's and portals are poised to begin to charge advertisers in a tier-based system, replete with premium services. Writing back in 1998, Bill Gates described a solution also espoused by Esther Dyson, chair of Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"As I first described in my book 'The Road Ahead' in 1995, I expect that eventually you'll be paid to read unsolicited e-mail. You'll tell your e-mail program to discard all unsolicited messages that don't offer an amount of money that you'll choose. If you open a paid message and discover it's from a long-lost friend or somebody else who has a legitimate reason to contact you, you'll be able to cancel payment. Otherwise, you'll be paid for your time."

Subscribers may not be appreciative of joint ventures between gatekeepers and inbox clutterers. Moreover, dominant ISP's, such as AT&T and PSINet have recurrently been accused of knowingly collaborating with spammers. ISP's rely on data traffic that spam generates for their revenues in an ever-harsher business environment.

The Financial Times and others described how WorldCom refuses to ban sale of spamware over its network, claiming that it does not regulate content. When "pink" (the color of canned spam) contracts came to light, implicated ISP's blame whole affair on rogue employees.

PC World begs to differ:

I abhor spam. I hate it with a vengeance and would do ALMOST anything to rid Internet of it entirely. The worldwide financial consequences alone run into billions of dollars annually.It is comparable to disruption that propagation of viruses causes and is responsible for creating a completely independent niche market for sale of tools and software programs designed simply to combat it. Although, I would imagine that even those engaged in this area of marketing would also welcome it's demise, however unlikely it might seem at moment.

The latest is a web page that we are all being asked to link to which, as I understand it, will result in email addresses listed on that page, which are 'known' spam originating addresses, being inundated with so much spam, generated by their own 'spiders' (entities which crawl Net looking for email addresses) that their data will be effectively useless due to spider being effectively sent on an endless 'loop'. A simple but brilliant little idea - But is it safe?

What if an innocent email address should find it's way onto that web page? What if one is maliciously placed there? Does that email address get caught up in vicious circle of unsolicited email? Maybe not, but even if method precludes this particular 'backfire', more to point, is it right to spam 'spammer'? If you rob a thief, doesn't that make YOU a thief too, regardless?

The fact remains also, there hasn't been a means of stopping spammers that has worked yet. Will they be somehow able to turn this idea around and use it against Internet population?