Spam deluge leads to search for silver bullet

Battle promises to be tough

IHateSpam's Eckelberry said that since the company launched its consumer filter last July, it has experienced dramatic growth.

"Our product has gotten good word-of-mouth" he said. "The amount of rage and anger out there over spam is amazing. People are really fed up."

Spam is becoming increasingly risque and offensive, which is leading more people to take action against it, Eckelberry said. But although users have been driven to fight a client-side battle against spam, he said he thinks that the war will be on the server side, before users have to deal with it.

Filters, no matter where they are located, aren't the only means being used to eliminate spam.

Many ISPs, like EarthLink, have a group dedicated to tracking down spammers. In fact, EarthLink won a $25 million settlement against a spammer last year, Anderson said.

But such big wins against spammers are rare, and furthermore, some say that current legislation designed to protect consumers from marketing fraud is not sufficient to deal with the problem.

Such is the view of Jason Catlett, president of privacy advocacy group Junkbusters, in Green Brook , N.J.

"What I've been advocating is legislation that gives people who have been spammed the right to sue the spammer for a small amount of money -- $50 to $500," Catlett said.

"User filtering is too late, it's a Band-Aid that doesn't address the problem," he added.

Catlett believes that without legislation hanging above spammers' heads like a sword of Damocles, e-mail could come to a tipping point where there is so much spam, it outnumbers legitimate e-mail, just as Jupiter predicts.

Fighting spammers on a technical scale is not enough, he said, because they are quite sophisticated and evasive in their methods.

Catlett isn't the only one proposing new legislation targeting spam. A number of antispam proposals have been introduced in the U.S. Congress and at least two pieces of legislation have been approved at the committee level in both the House and the Senate, but neither have received full congressional approval.