Al Coston, network administrator with the Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit community-redevelopment firm in Philadelphia, was getting so many complaints from its 75 employees about the pornographic messages that he decided to spend $2,000 on Vircom Inc.'s ModusGate filtering tool. The cost is minor if it prevents an employee from bringing a lawsuit against the company for creating a hostile working environment, Coston says.

But for the law firm of Gunderson Dettmer LLP, managing pornographic spam wasn't so easy. Originally, the firm used filters embedded in Trend Micro's antivirus tools to address the liability risk that such messages posed. "We had to do something," director of IT Eric Rosenberg says. Yet the Trend Micro filters weren't sophisticated enough to avoid blocking messages from clients seeking help with their own pornographic-spam issues. So Rosenberg turned to MailFrontier, a client of the firm, and its technology is keeping false positives to a minimum. The vendor's pending update promises even more precision.

Other companies hope the government will help. Twenty-six states have enacted anti-spam legislation, and the feds are under increasing pressure to do so, too. A bill introduced last month to prohibit spamming over wireless networks was just referred to a congressional subcommittee. Nearly 90% of business E-mailers want Congress to take action against spammers, according to a new survey of 1,400 workplace E-mail users conducted by Public Opinion Strategies for anti-spam vendor SurfControl plc. But the question of what constitutes spam, and what is legitimate broadcast E-mail, can be difficult to answer. (InformationWeek and its parent company, CMP Media, use E-mail for correspondence, research, and marketing purposes.)

What's more, while there's support for legislation, its effectiveness could be limited. Spam can be sent from anywhere in the world at minimal cost, and it requires very little response to be profitable-even less than telemarketing or junk mail. "If it becomes illegal in the United States, the spammers will just go offshore," says Michael Osterman, principal analyst at Osterman Research.

Larger players also are getting into spam blocking. Network Associates Inc. acquired anti-spam vendor Deersoft Inc. last month. It plans to introduce a desktop anti-spam tool in June and integrate Deersoft's rules-based technology into its McAfee WebShield and GroupShield apps by year's end. IBM Lotus Software beefed up the anti-spam capabilities of its Domino E-mail server and Notes client last fall, including support for subscription blacklists, prevention of servers from being tapped by spammers as a point of origin, and the ability to limit the number of recipients that can receive a given message. And with the release of Exchange Server 2003 later this year, Microsoft will bolster its basic filtering functionality by supporting blacklists and preventing address-verification by spammers.

Because spammers are both relentless and creative, staying on top of the problem is going to require diligence. Ben Sullivan, system administrator with Fanfare Media Works Inc., which promotes businesses to new neighborhoods, has found that the scripts he and his staff have written to support their Vircom ModusGate deployment have been largely effective in combatting spam. But he knows the battle will be won as much by vigilance as technology, and he's constantly studying the spammers themselves. "They're changing things all the time, and they're getting smarter," he says. "I'm watching." -with Tischelle George