Spam poses threat to privacy

"You ain't seen nothing yet," said Satish Ramachandran, chief executive of Mirapoint, a company which provides software to deal with the menace of unwanted commercial e-mails.

One of the first casualties of the fight against spam in the workplace would be privacy, said Mr Ramachandran.

"Privacy is going to go and people will just have to get used to it."

Surveillance

Speaking to BBC News Online this week, Mr Ramachandran warned that spammers were already opening a new front of attack in the workplace and, down the line, would exploit the multimedia potential of next generation mobile phone networks.

Add to this the fact that spammers will increasingly take advantage of wireless networks and users could expect an exponential rise in the amount of junk in their in-boxes, he said.

For the lucky few, the workplace is still a relatively spam-free zone, but filtering firm MessageLabs reports that the problem is on the rise with one in seven business e-mails now identified as spam.

MessageLabs estimates that around 10% of the working day is spent dealing with unsolicited e-mail, which in turn is having a big impact on business productivity.

The answer, according to Mr Ramachandran, will be more surveillance in the workplace and even tighter controls on what goes through the corporate e-mail network.

Mirapoint's software employs a point system for classifying e-mails, identifying up to 25 characteristics of spam and blocking the messages with the highest scores.

Cops and robbers

Mark Sunner, chief technology officer with MessageLabs, believes a balance must be struck between employee needs and the fight against spam.

In order to achieve that balance, filtering software will have to get a whole lot smarter.

"It is not hard to stop spam but it means being aggressive and the flipside to this is that you could be stopping real mail, which could be important, getting through," said Mr Sunner.

"Filtering companies will live or die on their ability to handle spam and not stop innocent mail," he added.

As the tools to deal with spam become increasingly sophisticated so too do the spammers.

"It is a game of cops and robbers," admitted Mr Ramachandran.

It is not just in the workplace that the fight against spam will get tougher.

Web-based e-mail accounts such as Hotmail will increasingly encourage users to have pre-approved accounts, in which they listed all the individuals they were prepared to receive messages from, said Mr Ramachandran.

Hotmail is already offering such a service, although only around 10% of its 110 million customers have taken it up.

Enemy within

In the home too, filters would become commonplace, said Mr Ramachandran, especially as parents respond to the threat of pornographic pictures that he believes will inevitably become a by-product of multi-media enabled mobile phones.

Fighting spam will not entirely eliminate the communication headaches for businesses, as a raft of high-profile "misuse of e-mail" cases highlight the fact that the enemy often lurks within an organisation.

Barriers on what employees can and cannot do will never eradicate the problem.

Websites such as internalmemo.com are proving highly popular on the net, offering an outlet for disgruntled employees to make previously private company e-mails public.