The worldwide war on spam continues.

According to a recent American Management Association survey, e-mail and inbox management has become the number-one office task, although few have learned how to manage e-mails effectively. The average employee now spends 25 percent of the workday on e-mail.

Spam-control companies say that volume continues to increase even after the new U.S. law on spam took effect January 1. Unwanted spam offers currently comprise 60 percent of all e-mail traffic, up from 58 per cent in December 2003, according to Enrique Salem, president and chief executive of Brightmail Inc., a service that scrubs spam for large Internet service providers (ISPs).

Because their customers are demanding better ways to fight unsolicited e-mails, the high tech industry is not waiting to see how effective the national anti-spam law proves to be. It is sharing resources to try to find new ways to eradicate spam.

For example, the ISP Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group, known as MAAWG, is focusing on finding legal and technological ways to block spam. Participating companies, including Adelphia Communications, Bell Canada, BellSouth, and Cox Communications, want to develop standards, an ISP code of conduct, and list of best practices that would reduce e mail abuse, not only for spam but also for denial-of-service attacks, worms, viruses, and other undesired events.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and America Online announced a collaboration to eliminate the spam problem last spring. Their "trusted sender" initiative--a caller ID-style system that would allow an e-mail account to accept legitimate bulk e-mail while turning away messages of unknown origin will be introduced soon.

According to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, spam will be history in a mere two years. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January, Gates said his company is studying ways e mail users can reduce or even eradicate the spam in their inboxes. One of its projects involves enabling e-mail users to charge senders a fee before accepting their messages. Gates said computer users could set different monetary thresholds for different senders. Microsoft is also researching "challenge-response" technology, in which senders get an automatic response from recipients asking for verification that the sender is a real person. Such systems are aleady used by Earthlink and other mail services.

Australian company CashRamSpam.com has already implemented a payment system that allows users to either block all unwanted e-mail by setting a high fee or make money by setting a lower fee for marketers who are willing to pay to have their messages read. The company receives 10 percent of what the recipients might earn.

The European Commission is getting serious about fighting spam as well. In a recent report, it urged European Union governments to strengthen sanctions against spam. The report notes that legislation is not enough to stop the tide of spare. "Spam has reached worrying proportions," the report stated, and runs the risk of stopping the use of e mail altogether. The European Union has also urged the United States to do more to stop spam. Several studies have revealed that at least 50 percent of all unsolicited e-mails originate in the United States.