Spam costs businesses $13 billion annually.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis

A British e-mail filtering firm reports that there will be more spam than real e-mail in 2003 and that it will cost businesses billions.

MessageLabs Software's annual statistics also revealed that one in every 212 e-mails contains a computer virus. MessageLabs, which sorts though 10 million e-mails daily and inspects more than three billion e-mails a year, says that an average of one in 12 e-mails was spam in 2002. But by November 2002, one in three e-mails was spam. Because of that trend, the firm predicts that spam will outpace real e-mail this year.

Mark Sunner, MessageLabs' chief technology officer, said the increase is a result of technology improvements that have made spammers' jobs easier. For example, he said, you can buy e-mail appliance boxes that will send millions of e-mails an hour.

Industry experts estimate that about one-third of the more than 73 billion e-mails sent every day are unwanted commercial pitches. According to a recent Jupiter Research study, the average amount of spam received per user each day has nearly doubled from 3.7 to 6.2 e-mails per day.

While personal e-mail accounts often are deluged with spare, however, most unsolicited...