The in-box intruders

Over the past few months, Bob Desrochers hasn't done any more online shopping than usual or sent extra e-mails. But during that time, the bed-and-breakfast owner in Canterbury, Conn., has received six times the usual amount of junk mail in his e-mail in-box.

The ads are rarely from respectable retailers. Some start with ludicrous questions: "Want to go to Hawaii for free?" Others promise dubious services: "Get out of debt - instantly!"

The majority, he says, promote links to pornographic sites - with come-ons that seem to grow more explicit by the week.

Mr. Desrochers and his wife, Jackie, say they now delete about 30 messages a day.

The growing bombardment of Americans' e-mail in-boxes with unsolicited advertisements - widely known as "spam" - is eliciting frustration from millions of computer users like the Desrochers, who, at work or at home, often spend at least 10 minutes a day sorting through and deleting the unwanted messages.

"The consensus among people who measure this sort of thing is that there's been a 10 to 30 percent increase in the amount of spam over the past six months," says John Mozena, vice president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail.

Observers credit the uptick to a range of factors. Among them: marketers' efforts to exploit consumer wariness of postal mail in the wake of the anthrax scare, and an economic downturn that has heightened the allure of easy sales jobs in the low-overhead world of online services.

Other experts say the spam spike is another byproduct of the Internet's Wild West environment, where few regulations restrain digital hucksters from invading personal privacy to make their pitch.

Consumer advocates complain that regulators can't keep pace with the volume of digital offers, shrouded in anonymity and cast as protected free speech. Indeed, officials have shown little vigilance in prosecuting even the most notorious offenders. But some advocates point to 1991 legislation aimed at "junk faxes" as a precedent for a major crackdown.

Spam has existed since the dawn of the Internet, but first began circulating at large levels around 1997, when the broader public started going online, experts say.

Now, spamming is a major industry. Technology has been the primary catalyst. Current computer programs now formulate millions of permutations of e-mail addresses from plausible and even nonsensical name and number combinations. (For example: pauln@hotmail.com, or ncp135@yahoo.com.)

Deeper-digging tools, called "bots," troll the Web for e-mail addresses of any sort, from a journalist's address placed at the end of a story, to a teenager's address posted on a chat room's "who's here" list.

Marketers cull the results and create a catalog with as many as 10 million addresses. The lists are stored on compact disc and cost about $50. They are often sold to dozens or hundreds of different spammers who download them onto a computer, which sprays out the spam.

Ultimately, the ad will bounce back from millions of nonexistent or defunct mailboxes. A huge majority of those who receive the message will simply delete it. Only a tiny fraction will act on the offer.

But for most spammers, there is little reason to narrow their audience. "Why bother with demographics? It doesn't cost them any more to send 10 or 10,000 [e-mails]," says Mozena.

The proliferation of junk e-mail carries costs beyond consumer annoyance. And it has global implications. Most observers estimate spam equals 10 percent of all e-mail worldwide. A study by the European Union estimated that the cost of handling all that spam is $8 billion. Burdened by the swelling currents of junk mail, Internet service providers (ISPs) incur heavy expenses beefing up their networks. That cost trickles down to consumers. The final cost to ISP end-users: between $2 and $3 of a monthly bill, according to a 1998 report by the state of Washington.

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