SURESH RAMASUBRAMANIAN maintains the barrier between 30 million e-mail users' inboxes and a sleazy world of Nigerian scam artists, naked teenage nymphomaniacs and dubious offers to enhance the sexual assets of men. The anti-spam specialist for Hong Kong-based Outblaze deals with 50 million unwanted e-mail messages every day - or about 600 pieces of junk mail a second. Mr Ramasubramanian is respectfully described in the industry as an 'anti-spam legend', but even he admits that the fight to stem the flood of virtual garbage clogging up the Internet is a battle that may never be won. 'It's like living in an apartment in Hong Kong; you accept that there are going to be cockroaches. If you go on the Internet, there is going to be spam,' he said. Spam has been around since the first commercial messages were posted to a newsgroup in 1995. But the ever-increasing volume has turned an annoyance into a major headache for Internet users and companies that provide e-mail. Outblaze spokesman Ibrahim El-Mouelhy estimates that up to 80 per cent of the 65 million messages his company handles each day are spam. Last year the ratio was 50:50. 'Already we identify and block a staggering number of messages every single day,' he said. A survey by software developer Brightmail found the amount of spam sent between November and February increased 46 per cent, while the overall amount of e-mail traffic increased by only 14 per cent. Research by Jupiter Media Metrix shows Internet users received an average of 461 spam messages last year. By 2006, the average person is expected to receive more than 1,600 spam messages - about half of their total e-mail. While most of the unwanted mail is blocked out and never reaches its target, the sheer volume of junk being sent means people's mailboxes are still getting filled with spam. At the same time, e-mail providers have to pay for the servers, bandwidth and blocking software to deal with the onslaught. It is difficult to put a number to the cost of spam, but some have estimated it as high as US$1 per message when lost productivity is included. Users of popular free e-mail services such as Microsoft's Hotmail report getting so much spam they have been forced to abandon their mailboxes in frustration. Hotmail users alone are said to receive more than one billion junk e-mails every day. Spam accounts for 80 per cent of all messages delivered, even after Microsoft applies a blocking and filtering program. 'And it's increasing every day,' Parul Shah, a product manager with Microsoft, told The New York Times. 'Every time Hotmail or another e-mail service provider finds a way to detect spam, the spammer immediately has a way to get around that.' Anne Mitchell, chief executive of United States-based Habeas, which sells anti-spam software, says that, ironically, part of the reason spam is on the increase is that blocking measures are getting better. 'Spammers have to send out more and more mail in order to achieve the same level of return,' she said. Ms Mitchell says unsuspecting users are also contributing to their own troubles by falling victim to the unscrupulous tactics used by some direct marketers. For example, one of the most common mistakes people make when they get unwanted e-mail is following the instructions to be removed from the mailing list. Ms Mitchell says users who ask not to get mail will often instead get more. 'They will find that they have just increased the premium on their e-mail address - now the spammers know that there is a live body at that e-mail address, who actually reads the spam sent to it. Suddenly, their e-mail address has jumped in value from, for example, 10 cents to US$1 for those spammers who sell lists of live e-mail addresses,' she said. Spam has also proliferated because it is cheap, easy to send and largely unregulated. Advertisements have reportedly appeared in Hong Kong offering a database of 2.1 million SAR e-mail addresses for HK$300. The database came with a programme which could send out up to 50,000 messages in an hour. According to the anti-spam group Spamcon Foundation, e-mail marketing costs less than one US cent per message to produce, compared with US$1 for telemarketing and 75 US cents for direct mail. Legally there is little protection for spam victims, and the laws that do exist are not easily enforced. Howard Womersley Smith, a lawyer in Hong Kong with Bird & Bird Solicitors, says e-mail used for direct marketing may fall under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, which requires the sender to provide the recipient with a legitimate form of the 'opt out' choice that Ms Mitchell says is being used to trick users into verifying their address. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell if you are replying to the real thing or signing up for more spam. It is illegal to use personal data - such as an e-mail address - for a purpose other than what it was provided for in Hong Kong, but no one has managed to use the law to stop being spammed. 'A spammer who has obtained his target's e-mail address from a professional collector or through automated harvesting software may fall foul of this principle. However, no claims for breach of these provisions by spammers have been brought in the Hong Kong courts,' said Mr Womersley Smith. Even the limited protection offered by Hong Kong law will not help if the spammer is located in another country, which they often are. While some jurisdictions, most notably in Europe and the US, are enacting anti-spam legislation, junk mail operations can easily set up in less-regulated places such as mainland China or Taiwan. China, in particular, has a reputation as a launching point for spammers. Earlier this year, scores of companies in Beijing were unable to send or receive e-mail from outside China for days after a junk mailer using the same Internet service provider (ISP) landed them all on an international blacklist. Many US ISPs block all mail coming from China due to spam. Last year, even Hong Kong's largest ISP, Netvigator, was threatened with a block for allegedly allowing junk e-mail to be routed through its network. Meanwhile, back at Outblaze, Mr Ramasubramanian says the flow of spam has become so bad that even he has trouble keeping his own personal mailbox uncluttered. 'I have an e-mail address I have been using for many years. I get about six to 10 messages a day and up to 100 pieces of spam.' If someone with Mr Ramasubramanian's credentials is left deleting 90 per cent of his mail, what hope is there for the rest of us? Graphic: spam30gbz