The influx of unsolicited commercial email (UCE or spam) into our inboxes is rapidly getting out of control. Any number of surveys will tell you it's increasing. For instance, recent data from well-known email security organisation MessageLabs suggests that spam accounts for over 75 percent of all email.

A recent report from Nucleus Research showed that employees of fortune-500 companies in the US are deluged with around 7500 spam messages per year, costing them over 3 percent of their productive time, inspite of the corporate filters in place.

Unfortunately, most corporations are forced to operate their spam filters in their least aggressive mode to ensure genuine emails are never falsely identified. You can thank recent hard-line corporate legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Ca SB 1386 and HIPAA for this attitude. Missing an important email would be much more costly than manually deleting spam.

By David Heath at The Age.

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