The Spam Battleground

This article was originally printed in the August/September 2003 issue of The Connecticut Lawyer, Volume 14/Number 1.

Does this sound familiar? You open your e-mail and you have 50 messages in your inbox. When you finally get through all of them, it turns out that 40 of the 50 messages were spam (unsolicited, bulk, commercial e-mail messages) from senders you don’t know. Spam messages offer a dizzying array of goods and services, such as printer toner cartridges, credit cards, online diplomas, and pornography and get-rich-quick schemes. As you delete spam after spam, you may wonder how all of these spammers find you and why the number of spam messages you receive seems to keep increasing. If it is any consolation, you are not alone. Spam is estimated to have increased by more than 60% in the last year alone. Internet service providers ("ISPs") estimate that 40%- 80% of their daily e-mail traffic consists of spam and several