At 2am, the red squiggle begins to rise. Sharply.
The workers sitting in the dimly lighted room barely look up at the white screen on the wall that tracks the deluge of unwanted e-mail to millions of In boxes. They already know it's happening.
Their computer monitors are filled with e-mail meant to appeal to the lonely and insecure: Free XXX video. Debt consolidation. Breast enhancement. Viagra. Work from home. Beat cellulite.
It is the middle of the night on the West Coast, but spam attacks -- e-mail messages sent to multiple addresses often lumped together as "undisclosed recipients" -- are bubbling up from all corners of the Internet. Spam doesn't sleep.
Click and type. Cut and paste. Save. Export. That is how spam filters are created in the round-the-clock war room run by Brightmail, a company that performs filtering for Internet service providers like Earthlink, MSN and AT&T Worldnet as well as companies trying to keep their e-mail systems unclogged.
In the war room, the steady pulse of keyboard and mouse clicks is punctuated by brief declarations.
"I got the Viagra," calls out one 20-something employee as he clicks to create a simple filter.
"I need help on the breast enhancement," announces another.
Spammers are like fruit flies. They multiply. They are elusive. Worst of all, they evolve quickly. The most aggressive spammers have become very sophisticated, constantly varying subject lines, "from" addresses and body text.
Joe Long, a war-room employee, remembers when times -- and spam -- were simpler. Two years ago, he and his colleagues would sometimes be able to parry all the attacks and clear their to-do list. "That never happens now," Long said.
For in addition to becoming more sophisticated, spammers have become more prolific. These days, more and more junk e-mail is finding its way into In boxes.
Volume multiplies
Brightmail says that the volume of spam it encounters has almost tripled in the last nine months. The company adds that 12 to 15 percent of total e-mail traffic is spam; a year ago, that figure was closer to 7 percent. Brightmail, which maintains a network of In boxes to attract spam, now records 140,000 spam attacks a day, each potentially involving of thousands, if not millions, of messages.
Statistics like these are supported by anecdotal evidence from computer users, who report that they are seeing more and more unwanted e-mail every time they log on. Hounded by spam, some computer users have simply abandoned e-mail addresses.
Spamming is relatively simple to do -- it is not much harder to send 1 million e-mail messages than it is to send one.
But some analysts say that the increase may also result, paradoxically, from the efforts to curb spam. A kind of arms race may have developed, those analysts say: The more efforts are made to block unwanted e-mail, the more messages spammers send to be sure that some will get through.
Whatever the reasons, individual complaints about e-mail are echoed by Internet service providers, some of which say that 50 percent of incoming e-mail traffic is spam.
Consumer advocates and politicians are complaining too, and proposing new laws to fight spam. Governmental agencies are also announcing new initiatives in the battle.
Toothless fed
The US Federal Trade Commission receives 40,000 spam complaints a day at its Web site, www.ftc.gov/spam. It has an e-mail address, uce@ftc.gov ("uce" stands for "unsolicited commercial e-mail"), to which people can forward spam e-mail that they receive. To date, the FTC has collected more than 12 million such messages, which are kept in what is known as the refrigerator, a computer database in the FTC's Internet lab.
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