Ever since it became better known as a term for unsolicited e-mail than as a brand name for spiced ham, spam has inspired debate and suggestions about how to reduce it, legislate against it, and shuttle it elsewhere. But many experts say that those who want to completely eradicate the scourge of unwanted e-mail have only one realistic option: forget about it.
Although better technological controls have provided some measure of relief, spam still is responsible for about 70 percent of mail to consumers. For businesses, who tend to have better protections in place, the statistic is better, but not by much: almost half of the entire e-mail traffic into a company is spam, spam, spam.
In the past few years, filters have become better at tweezing apart the annoying from the legitimate. On the enforcement front, Microsoft  has been dogged in its pursuit of spammers, and the Federal Trade Commission has displayed equal enthusiasm in its desire to unclog the country's filters. Consumers have gotten savvier about practicing safe surfing, and many have even set up separate e-mail accounts hoping to cut down on junk in their "real" inboxes.
With all this focus on lowering the flood of unwanted e-mail, why is the world still drowning in it?
All-Out Assault
Perhaps the most significant challenge to reducing spam is the necessity to tackle it on several fronts. As historians could point out, waging a war on too many battlegrounds often leads to a white flag being waved in the end.
With spam, the front lines are rife with technology tools, lawsuits, law enforcement in numerous countries, legislation efforts, and I.T. diligence. Blocking a few messages by changing a desktop 's filter is one thing. Stopping everything that potentially could be directed at that machine is quite another.
Technology, at least, is fighting the good fight. Tools have gotten more refined, to the point where false positives -- which trap legitimate mail and hold it in quarantine -- have been reduced. Samantha McManus, business strategy manager for Microsoft's technology care and safety team, said that her company is able to block more than 95 percent of incoming spam from customers' inboxes.
That amount of protection is admirable, considering that more than 4 billion incoming e-mail messages are routed to MSN Hotmail every day, and, according to McManus, almost 90 percent of those are spam. (continued...)
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