The famous term coined by America Online, “You’ve got mail,” has taken on a dual meaning in the age of electronic mail and mass marketing. According to multiple sources, inboxes receive up to 50 percent of junk mail from unwanted commercial solicitors on a daily basis.

While “spam” has become a top complaint filed by e-mail users, leading e-mail providers have responded by attempting to deter spammers through technology advances and government legislation.

New programming will make the work of companies who send spam harder by inconveniencing mass e-mails through delaying their delivery.

According to Microsoft spokesperson Amy Petty, Microsoft, Inc. has been developing several programs as managing tools to control the flow of spam.

Petty said Microsoft currently uses SmartScreen Technology, in which an anti-spam filter is trained to distinguish between good e-mails and junk through a programmed process. However, Petty said more technology is needed to help regulate unsolicited e-mails, as spammers continually deceive current filters.

Under the company’s “Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative” area, Petty said there are many different programs to block spam e-mails from getting to your mailbox.

One program named “Caller ID for E-mail” is planned to make it more difficult for marketers to reach users by only allowing mail from legitimate e-mail addresses. Another program in the development stages requires computers to solve puzzles before sending an e-mail. The intention is to slow down spammers who are sending out thousands of e-mails daily. The increase in time and money is hoped to decrease the volume of junk mail, but representatives at the conference said the system will not inconvenience the average user.

America Online, Inc., Earthlink, Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo! Inc. held a press conference March 10 in Washington, D.C. to announce plans to press charges against notorious spam manufacturers. The four companies were the founders of the industry’s first alliance acting in response to spam. Their case is based of the “CAN-SPAM” bill, enacted Jan. 1.

Executive Vice President and General Council of America Online Randall Boe expressed the company’s future plans to combat spam at the conference.

“These are the first industry lawsuits that have been filed since the passing of the federal CAN-SPAM Act, and we expect that this will not be the last wave of industry lawsuits,” Boe said at the conference.

“AOL, Earthlink, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have worked together, combined investigative resources, shared investigative leads, shared our own experience in tracking and finding spammers and suing them,” Boe said. “Today, the fruits of that are evident in the six lawsuits targeting hundreds of the most notorious spammers on the Internet.”

Boe warned spammers of the possible judicial consequences for their actions.

“We’re going to sift through the fake identities. We’re going to track through the fake corporations. We’re going to find the compromised accounts, and ultimately, we are going to find you and sue you.”

University of Wisconsin junior Traci Almer is annoyed with the inconvenience of spam in her e-mail account, but does not foresee the problem as ever being completely solved.

“It seems that with all the attention being paid to spam, we are making progress to solving the problem,” Almer said. “However, I think that spammers will continue to develop ways to get past the filters, consequences or not.”

Brian Rust, Communications Manager at Department of Information Technology, said that UW’s DoIT has taken active measures to help prevent unsolicited e-mails from reaching e-mail accounts.

UW’s WiscMail filtering service was launched in August of 2003. The free-of-charge filtering service relocates spam to a specific folder designated for junk mail, which acts as a receptacle for spam for 15 days until deleting it from the system. System settings range from low to high, depending on the amount of messages a user wants to block. Adjustments to the filters are provided to decrease the likelihood of intended mail being mislabeled as spam. For instance, users can create a “white list” to allow all types of mail from specific senders, or a “black list” to completely disable a sender from sending mail to the user’s address.

More than a million messages are sent to WiscMail accounts on a daily basis.

“About 40-50 percent of all mail flowing through the WiscMail servers fits the profile of ‘spam,'” Rust said.

Currently, 9,656 users of WiscMail, or about one fourth of the system, are filtering.

“Our filtering service and overall e-mail system is fairly unique among peer institutions. The hardware/software combination and the tools of filtering, storage and forwarding provided to users were developed to meet the unique requirements of the campus,” Rust said.

UW’s current filter system only scans e-mails sent from outside the system. Rust said 75 percent of spam originates from off-campus sources.

“We do not plan to scan within the WiscMail system because it would further slow the delivery of mail and, to this point, that isn’t where we have experienced the greatest spam and virus problem,” Rust said.