The pitch for StealthMail Master is as blunt as it is troubling. "For anonymity, E-mails are sent out through open proxy servers making your E-mail look like it came from somewhere else," boasts online promotional copy for the bulk E-mailing software. "Your ISP won't hear about your bulk E-mail operation anymore. They will stop hating you for ruining their reputation."

A man who answered the company's telephone last month said it declines all news media requests to discuss its products. "You guys are just a problem to us," he said.

Tech professionals feel much the same about spammers. "It's a scourge," says Eric Hahn, former chief technology officer of Netscape and founder of messaging-infrastructure company Proofpoint Inc. While Hahn's dislike of spammers is widely held, his view of the ongoing effort to squash spam is more controversial. "The good news is the good guys are winning," he says.

Such optimism comes easily to those selling spam-fighting software. "We've reached a turning point in the spam wars," says Paul Judge, CTO of anti-spam vendor CipherTrust Inc.

Few outside the anti-spam industry are so sanguine. Yankee Group analyst Phebe Waterfield says it's hard to claim we're winning when some two-thirds of E-mail on the Net qualifies as spam. The Radicati Group estimates spam costs an employer of 10,000 people $487,600 just for additional Exchange servers required to handle the load, a cost that it projects will exceed $2.5 million by 2007. A typical company with 21 Exchange E-mail servers devotes about five of them to handling junk E-mail, Radicati Group says. Waterfield puts annual productivity costs at $100 per person.

Spam has grown more dangerous as well as more expensive. Its goal used to be emptying wallets by selling dubious products. Increasingly, its aim is simply to steal or to subvert computers via virus. Phishing attacks--by which fraudsters send E-mail and Web links that appear to be from a well-known company to steal personal information--grew 43% just from February to March of this year, which represents 402 unique phishing scams, reports the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

Amid this gloom, though, there does seem to be a notable measure of progress: Less spam appears to be getting delivered.

"Like everybody else, we got hit pretty hard by the spam explosion," says Sam Shoen, Web team manager for U-Haul International Inc. Many of the truck-rental company's employees aren't technically sophisticated and often click on suspect messages, Shoen says. "There was a lot of spyware," he says. "That was a huge maintenance nightmare."

U-Haul bought Proofpoint Protection Server, which can cost $2 to $20 per in-box a year depending on number of employees, and discovered that 70% of the E-mail it received was spam. "It was like a weight being lifted off us," he says.

Robby VanderKaay, director of IT operations and infrastructure at real-estate developer Hines Interests LP, says spam is a minor nuisance since installing NetIQ Corp.'s MailMarshal. With a spam rate that approaches 70%, he says his company destroys more than 25,000 E-mails a day. VanderKaay credits the software's attachment blocking for keeping the company safe from the recent Bagel worm. Increasingly, fighting spam is being treated as a facet of network security.

Another common theme is that the priority for stopping spam comes from the top. At consulting firm AE Business Solutions, the chairman of the board, by virtue of being at the company the longest, got more spam than anyone. After installing Sybari Software Inc.'s Antigen for Microsoft Exchange, that number has dropped to zero most of the time, says Todd Marcotte, senior IS engineer at the consulting firm. His reward: The chairman stopped him in the hallway to mention the improvement. The price for Sybari's Advanced Spam Manager is $17.25 per user for 250 users for a two-year license.