The University of Maryland issued a report saying that spam costs businesses approximately $22 billion in lost productivity each year. Researchers determined the cost via a telephone-based survey that discovered each adult who uses the Internet receives 18.5 spam messages every day, at the price tag of 2.8 minutes to delete them. Calculating that in respect to averge U.S. wages, the total loss in time and productivity adds up to $21.6 billion. It doesn’t help that the CAN-SPAM Act seems to have accomplished little in the way of preventing un-solicited e-mail. And, as IDG News Service correspondent Grant Gross reported in late December, CAN-SPAM may, in fact, be making things worse for my inbox. By some accounts, CAN-SPAM has actually legalized spamming, at least in some capacities. What’s most surprising to me is that, according to the University of Maryland survey, the average number of spam messages people receive is only 18.5 a day, when I personally am inundated with more than one hundred every day. It takes me well more than 3 minutes to delete them, too, even though I don’t open any spam, something the surveyors found 14 percent of recipients do. Furthermore, 4 percent admit to purchasing something they came across in spam sometime during the last year. That statistic tells an important story: As ludicrous as it sounds to those of us who can’t stand spam, it really does work. There is no question that spam is a volume game — send out 1 million emails and if you get 4 percent of the victims to buy something, then you just found yourself 40,000 customers. Meanwhile, industry analysts are saying spam will get worse, with projections that the damage in 2005 will be close to $50 billion, including both lost productivity and network maintenance. Security