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even less. If they make even a penny of every thousand emails sent, then sending two million emails can net a nice profit.

We pay the Price

Even conservative estimates indicate that nearly half the email traffic on the Internet is spam. Moving this much information about and trying to get the signal from the noise is costly for corporate IT departments and Internet Service Providers. A large number of companies have sprung up exclusively dedicated to dealing with spam. It is a continual arms race. Anti-spam companies devise new defenses only to be countered by ever more creative junk merchants.

The problem has gotten bad enough to draw legislative action. In 2003 President Bush signed the CAN-SPAM act into law. This bill outlined the legal way to send commercial email and defined penalties for those who failed to follow it. After some initial successes, it is now widely ignored.

Spam Blasters

Some technical fixes have been more successful. Self-learning junk filter are now widely employed by Internet service providers and companies alike. These programs constantly hunt for patterns in your in-box. When you mark something as junk, they look at the visible content of the message as well as the detailed technical information (such as the routing information). In this way, they can adapt quickly to new threats. Even so they sometimes miss and label good mail (often called 'ham') as junk. More often, they err on the side of caution and let a suspicious message through.

Email providers have also had some success with 'black lists'. These are lists of known spam source and spam friendly mail services. Any message from one of these sources is either immediately considered junk, or marked for greater scrutiny. Sometimes however, innocent mailers and legitimate businesses get caught in the cross fire. Remember those innocent computers hijacked to send trash? They frequently get black listed.

The battle between spammers and tech professionals is not likely to end any time soon. Both sides simply have to much to gain to give up the fight easily. In the mean time, make sure to keep your virus scanning software updated and remember: if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

Learn more about this author, David Hamilton.
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