New Ways to Can Spam E-mail

June 19 -- For many e-mail users, the war against unsolicited commercial messages — better known as spam — seems to be overwhelmingly impossible to win.

There's no escaping e-mails that tout herbal remedies, porn sites, and low-rate mortgages and credit cards.

Even more depressing: Analysts predict that the problem of junk e-mail will only get worse.

According to industry research firm Jupiter Research in New York, the average Internet user received more than 700 spam messages last year. And by 2006, that figure will jump to nearly 1,500 unsolicited e-mails.

But several companies are working on advanced solutions that may help beleaguered consumers and Net companies turn the tide against spammers.

One such company is Cloudmark, a startup in San Mateo, Calif., founded by Jordan Ritter — one of the developers of the Napster music-sharing service — and Vipul Ved Prakash, a software developer.

Cloudmark today released SpamNet, a new type of so-called spam filter. Such software attempts to spot and catch spam by looking for telltale signs — specific words in the message such as "get rich quick," for example.

However, in many cases, identifying what words or traits to look for requires human intervention. Once these words or traits are identified, they must then be encoded into an appropriate filter and distributed to different users.

But spammers can fool many of these filters through a variety of ways. They might, for example, merely change the message's subject line into something innocuous such as "For your information" rather than a blatantly worded sales pitch.

"It's almost like guerrilla warfare," says Ed Plaskon, product director for AT&T WorldNet Services. "We come up with solutions [to filter spam], and [spammers] work around that."

Spam Filtered by Committee

But Ritter says SpamNet may solve this problem because it's built to work quickly on a so-called peer-to-peer network of computers — similar to the old Napster system.