It's been just over a year since my personal e-mail account started getting upwards of 20 junk mails a day and I ditched it for a new, spam-free one. I created another -- simple enough when you have your own domain -- but found in mere months that I was right back where I started. Even taking great care not to let my personal address fall into the hands of spammers, my inbox nonetheless came to resemble the last five pages of a porno mag. How did this happen to me again, and so quickly?

As you read this, a war is on between spammers and those working to stem the flood of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). It's partly a legal battle, with laws being passed in the United States and Europe that define strict guidelines for the transmission of UCE and stiff penalties for firms that fail to comply. But the Internet is a global entity, and any discussion of legislation regarding the control of Internet-borne content must eventually confront the thorny issues of jurisdiction and enforcement. Consequently little progress has been made in legally dealing with spam, though everyone agrees that a problem exists.

The scale of the problem of junk e-mail is becoming clearer as data on spam's growth become available. Reports on the spam's financial impact are released regularly. One recent report by Ferris Research ( www.ferris.com ) estimates the cost of spam in the U.S. alone at over $10 billion in 2003. Quantified in terms of CPU cycles, disk storage requirements, bandwidth requirements and reduced productivity, the figures clearly demonstrate the immense and growing scale of the problem.