What do Viagra, stock tips, personal ads and activities with farm animals have in common? They are all the subject lines of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail messages, not-so-affectionately known as spam. The sheer volume of electronic junk mail has overwhelmed users' inboxes . . .
What do Viagra, stock tips, personal ads and activities with farm animals have in common? They are all the subject lines of unwanted, unsolicited e-mail messages, not-so-affectionately known as spam. The sheer volume of electronic junk mail has overwhelmed users' inboxes and IT managers in the past few years, consuming valuable bandwidth and storage space while embarrassing and annoying its recipients.

According to research firm IDC, in 2002, spam volume jumped 28 percent in North America alone, to 870 billion messages. That figure is expected to surpass 1 trillion by the end of 2003, according to Mark Levitt, vice president of IDC's Collaborative Computing Program.

Spurred by fear of "hostile environment" employee lawsuits and concerned about lost productivity hours, companies have turned to anti-spam technologies to eliminate -- or at least reduce the number of -- such undesirable e-mail messages. Several spam-fighting software firms have seen measurable financial benefits as a result, and there is a likelihood that they will follow the same lucrative path blazed by antivirus vendors.

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