Neil Barrett

Regular readers of this column - if such mythical creatures exist - will know that I have a particular hatred for spam. And anyone who has followed the spam problem over the last few months will be all too aware that the daily deluge of unsolicited marketing and pornographic material has been growing steadily worse. Figures from reputable organisations - in particular, MessageLabs - underline this growth. By July of this year, they indicate, spam will account for more than half of all global email traffic.

That is a truly sobering thought, and begs the question of quite where this deluge is coming from and what can be done to prevent it.

It is a result of simple economics, simple technology and the simple nature of electronic mail. Figures, again from MessageLabs, show that even if the spammers act legitimately and do not hijack email servers, it need cost them only £2.40 and four hours of dial-up time to send one million unsolicited messages. If only a fraction of these result in interest then the minimal effort is more than justified.

The target addresses are easy to obtain. Simple software "harvests" the addresses from web sites and public directories: if you have ever allowed an email address to be recorded on a directory, you are certain to be on the spammers' target lists. But even if you have not, a second program - working like an infinite number of monkeys randomly producing email address after email address - might well find you.

You cannot run and you cannot hide. Is the only solution to abandon email addresses as they start to attract the inevitable surge of spam?

Fortunately not. There are several approaches being tried to rid us of this scourge. First, many software firms - including MessageLabs and Brightmail - offer tools to filter out the most recognisable spam. On one of my accounts, the success rate has been staggeringly high. But, of course, some spam still makes it through, and I worry that legitimate messages might be interrupted.

An alternative is to prevent the problem at the source. Studies suggest that most spam is sent by just a hundred or so professionals, who might be stopped by legal measures. The Advertising Standards Agency, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL are seeking to block spam and even the Internet Engineering Task Force - the body that most completely controls the internet - is trying to stem the tide.

There is a third and even more interesting approach that has been suggested: a modification to the very way in which email is handled. Called "Tagged Message Delivery Agent", it involves querying every non-recognised sender of email messages to establish whether they are legitimate. A white list and a black list of legitimate and non-legitimate correspondents is maintained, and if a response is received to an "unrecognised sender" query then the sender can be included on either list as appropriate.

Perhaps, slowly and carefully, we might be clawing towards at least a partial solution to the problem of spam. And what's more, one that doesn't involve throwing our precious email addresses away.

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