Frustration, costs grow as legitimate correspondence is caught in web of filters.

George Huang is not a spammer. An economist who graduated magna cure laude from Harvard, Huang has a respectable job at the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County that has him analyzing trends in international, national and local business.

But that doesn't matter to the e-mail filters installed for many of the 3,000 subscribers to his weekly e-Edge newsletter.

"I'm pulling my hair out," complained Huang, who said he spends at least 10 hours a week dealing with all the problems that arise when the publication gets caught in various filters and spam blockers that bounce it back to him. "What I have to do now is keep apologizing and just have the patience to delete the extra e-mails."

The scourge of spam, that unending flood of unwanted e-mail hawking herbal Viagra, low-interest mortgages and get-rich quick schemes that jams inboxes, has given rise to an industry bent on eradicating it.

And as the battle over spam has escalated, newsletters such as Huang's have become collateral victims. So have individual pieces of e-mail that get rejected--sometimes returned to the sender, sometimes jettisoned into cyberspace--because the recipient's mailbox is maxed out from spare.

Alex Glazer, president of Alpha Lex Systems Integration, a Chatsworth-based computer consulting firm, said about 85 percent of the 1,000 e-mails he receives each day are junk--a volume that can affect company or job performance.

"In my e-mail I have something where clients can request online quotes for my services," Glazer said. "If I lose one of those e-mails I am directly impacted in my business. I know some people who swear by their filters, but I have gone through my junk box and found e-mails that were legitimately sent to me. It only needs to happen once and it's a big deal if it gets deleted."

While users can program their systems to accept e-mail containing key words, just as they can block certain words or phrases, Glazer said it's a tricky, time consuming process. "If you're expecting even just one e-mail per day, you don't want to have to change the rules every day. And if you have to pick up the phone to tell them an e-mail is coming, you might as well just call them in the first place."

At travel agencies, for example, e-mail is a regular part of business. When clients don't get an e-mail confirmation or itinerary, it can sometimes mean a missed flight or a chance to book a vacation deal.

At European Travel in downtown Los Angeles, office manager Christine Demiral said the firm receives 200 e-mails from customers daily, some of which don't get through. "Sometimes it happens when they sent something and we haven't received it and we are not able to reply to them (about a reservation)," she said. "It's more a matter of inconvenience."

Nucleus Research Inc. has calculated that businesses will spend nearly $2,000 per employee this year in lost productivity and associated information technology costs just fighting spam, a 45 percent increase from last year.

Nucleus based its assessment on a $60,000-per-year worker spending 64 hours a year dealing with e-mail glitches, the added IT costs to set up systems to block spam, and the wasted space on servers and in bandwidth costs.

"Spammers have become more sophisticated in the way they cheat filters," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of the Wellesley, Mass.-based technology tracking firm. "It has evolved incredibly in the last year. If your system is more than nine months old it's outdated."

While spammers can devote time and money to coming up with ways to get around filters, legitimate bulk e-mailers generally lack the resources to keep up.

PKF Consulting, which tracks the hotel industry, has been unable to send its monthly hospitality market update to many of its clients. Likewise, Alf Nucifora of the Nucifora Consulting Group in Atlanta said about 40 percent of his subscribers have not received this month's copy of The Alf Report newsletter because filtering software is bouncing it back. Most troublesome, he said, are the stringent spam controls in the new AOL 9 version.

"Corporate firewalls and spam filters are taking newsletters and popping them into the spam box," he said. "It's a major problem for legitimate people."

Despite his efforts to alert subscribers, he still can't beat the filters. When newsletters include words that set off the spare detectors, as occurred in a recent missive about a court case involving Viagra, it was sent to the junk folder.

Small business headache

Defending against unwanted, intrusive and at times offensive e-mail has become increasingly frustrating for small business owners hard pressed to keep up with the costs and technologies.

For several days last October, Santa Monica public relations firm Casey Sayre & Williams found out the hard way that even e-mail spammers crave publicity.

"It was a nightmare," said Barbara Casey, whose server was hijacked and used to bombard employees and their contacts--whose e-mail addresses were contained in the system--with scores of pornographic ads. "The e-mails were so raw I couldn't even look at my computer."

Casey hired Alpha Lex to filter and secure the e-mail system, but wasn't able to find an immediate solution that sifted spare without sending clients' e-mail to the trash. Instead, the firm settled for a remedy that rid the company of most of the pore ads.

Glazer said he frequently opts for low-tech solutions customized for each company. For Casey, he implemented a less expensive "common sense" policy that limited out-of-office messages to prevent spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses on the firm's computer.

"We're desperately looking for new software," said Glazer, who works with about 200 clients. "What you get now is a lot of e-mail being dumped into a separate inbox that you're going to have to sort through anyway."

The most effective filtering systems carry the highest price tags and run the gamut from broad-based systems that collect junk mail at the server level, keeping it from reaching desktops, to off-the-shelf programs installed on individual computers.

Retail solutions such as MailFrontier Inc.'s Matador, Cloudmark Inc.'s SpamNet and Qurb Inc.'s Qurb can range from $20 to $60 and are frequently used by businesses with limited resources. But most anti-spam technology works inside the corporate firewall, which blocks employees' computers from spam, but does not relieve the IT department of the increasing daily burden of handling the unwanted transmissions.

Executive search firm Korn/Ferry International began using a system from Brightmail Inc., acquired by Symantec Inc. in June, late last year to eliminate the crippling waves of spare sent to its 1,500 employees worldwide. The software scours more than 200 blacklists to identify spammers.

"We looked at several versions and this seemed to be very powerful," said Dan Demeter, Korn/Ferry's chief information officer and senior vice president. "For us it was a low-cost and effective solution because we don't want other people to handle our mail. It allows us to keep a level of privacy."