Spam fighters plan a conference in the Boston area in January to compare notes on means of fighting the scourge.

"Arrangements will be very informal: no fees, sponsorships, proceedings, luncheons, contests, etc.," according to the announcement on www.spamconference.org. "Just a series of quick, concentrated talks, and then we all go off and get Chinese food."

Speakers will include leading spam filter developers such as pioneering hacker John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper, renowned for hacking into the phone system about 35 years ago; John Graham-Cumming, whose POPfile open-source application is a means of filtering spam and other categories of E-mail using a statistical technique called Bayesian filtering; Paul Graham, author of a paper describing in plain English how Bayesian filtering could be used to sort spam; open-source advocate Eric Raymond; and Barry Shein, president of Boston Internet service provider The World.

The conference's Web site doesn't state who the sponsors of the conference are. The site is registered to Graham.

The conference will be at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 17.