Heavy-handed anti-spam filtering can frequently lead to the loss of legitimate emails.

"Spam is one of the Internet's dirty little secrets, and it's bad enough when your mom gets targeted with porn stuff and get-rich quick schemes. But the people who prey on the public selling worthless products related to the events of Sept. 11 are amo...

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to announce a series of actions against suspected spammers in coming weeks.

In the three seconds it takes to read this sentence, more than a half-million e-mails will land in in-boxes. By 2005, nearly that many will land each second. The e-mail avalanche knows no rank.

In the past year, spam has moved beyond personal e-mail accounts, invading business systems and graduating from societal pest to corporate enemy.

The seven werpetrators agreed to settle charges that they were spamming consumers with deceptive chain letters. Financial terms of the settlements were not disclosed.

More than 30 percent of all e-mail is unsolicited and MessageLabs predicts that spam will continue its exponential growth into 2003, surpassing the amount of non-spam e-mail by around July.

Spam is not overwhelming the inboxes of US workers, despite the growing number of junk e-mails promoting get-rich-quick scams or pornographic websites, says a report.

Americans are discovering that the broad effort to fight spam can backfire.

Shifting from daily nuisance to serious IT and business concern, uncontrolled spam is prompting customers to arm themselves with tools to fight back against productivity loss, potential liability and bandwidth-clogging consequences that unsolicited co...