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	The Junk-Mail Economy
	Why spammers spam.
	Six Ways to Reclaim Your Inbox
	The new generation of spam-fighters.

All of which lends a kind of vigilante appeal to a new product being readied for delivery to businesses later this fall by San Francisco startup Cloudmark. Called SpamNet, a version is already available as a plug-in to Microsoft's (MSFT) ubiquitous Outlook e-mail client and harnesses the viral power peer-to-peer networking to identify undesirable e-mail as quickly as it appears. Once any user marks a message as spam, it can be blocked from every other computer on the network. The software's effectiveness will depend, of course, on how many users are on the network. Still, the premise of enlisting every corporate e-mail user in an antispam posse is an intriguing one. It might be just the thing to make spammers, for a change, the ones who wake up sweating.

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The Junk-Mail Economy  Why do spammers spam? Because it looks so easy. For a spammer, technological progress holds many blessings. E-mail software keeps getting cheaper. So do processing power and bandwidth, which means, in turn, that e-mail solicitations become cheaper to send. And as the cost of spamming plummets, more people are enticed to do more of it. It's what junk-mail fighters call the "spam economy." Today, for 20 bucks, one can buy a CD-ROM with hundreds of thousands of working e-mail addresses. For another $100, a neophyte spammer can buy bulk-mailing software good enough to send out 10,000 messages a day through a dial-up modem. If a spammer is selling something for $20, he's covered his nut after six responses. Everything else is gravy. For Tom Cowles's spamming operations at Empire Towers, that gravy could be served in a dump truck. He says he has 300 servers around the country hooked up to high-speed Internet connections, each one capable of pumping out more than 10 million offers for herbal and nutritional supplements every day. (Take what he says with a grain of salt; this is a spammer.) Cowles claims he grosses more than $12 million a year, and he adds, "That's without even trying hard." Difficult to believe? It could be true. To bring in $1 million a month, a spammer needs a $20 purchase from only one out of every 2,000 spammees, or just 0.05 percent. A respectable response rate for direct snail-mail is 10 times that.  Six Ways to Reclaim Your Inbox  A new generation of spam-fighting products promises to protect the office computer. PRODUCT PRICE HOW IT WORKS CUSTOMERS Brightmail Anti-Spam $5-$10.50 per user per year Scans millions of dummy e-mail accounts to detect the latest spam attack and deflect it. AT&T Worldnet, Cypress Semiconductor Elron Software's IM Message Inspector Initial fee of $15 per user; then $3 per user per year Monitors mail traffic for telltale signs of spam; also scans outgoing messages for inappropriate language. 20th Century Fox MailShell SpamCatcher Service Typically $16-$20 per user per year Grabs spam before it hits company servers. Not available MailShell SpamCatcher Software $15 per user per year Allows businesses to set up their own spam-grabbing servers (plug-in also available for Microsoft Outlook). Not available Postini Perimeter Manager $2 per user per month (estimate) An electronic "bouncer" intercepts spam before it hits company servers. Forrester Research Trend Micro ScanMail eManager $16.50-$23 per user Similar to Elron's IM Message Inspector International Truck & Engine

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