Spam, those incredibly bothersome, unwanted e-mail messages, are not only bothersome — they're enormously costly in terms of man-hours spent dealing with them.

Just ask Anthony Napoleon, Ph.D., who heads Napoleon Litigation Consulting Inc., a La Jolla, Calif., firm that advises lawyers on forensics and the nuances of psychology and the law.

"We were getting deluged with so much spam that we had to do something about it," Dr. Napoleon tells Cosmetic Surgery Times. "We put our name on the federal do-not-call list, thinking that would help — the calls stopped, but the spam continued. We took other steps to protect against it, like spam-blocking software — it wasn't very effective."

SPAM'S PRICETAG

Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based market research company, has calculated the negative effects of dealing with spam by measuring loss of worker productivity and consumption of technical resources and support time. Ferris' conclusion? Unwanted commercial email costs U.S. corporations $8.9 billion — and that figure is from 2002! More recent studies — notably one by Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center — place the dollar-loss figure at between $10 billion and $20 billion a year.

What's a businessperson or medical practitioner to do? Increasingly, they're doing what Dr. Napoleon did: turning to IT companies that specialize in systems that disallow spam. In Dr. Napoleon's case, he contracted with Seattle-based SpamArrest.

"I've been a SpamArrest customer for about five years," he says. "We were getting as much as 1,000 e-mail messages a day, more than half of which were illegitimate. We found that the typical spam-blocking software was not doing the job effectively. What the SpamArrest system does is require a human being to be on the other side to answer prompts and prove the message is legitimate — something that electronically generated machine mailers can't do."

According to SpamArrest C.E.O. Brian Cartmell, spam filters and other traditional measures can only stop a trickle of the spam deluge.

"Numerous methods have been devised to prevent the proliferation of spam, including keyword-matching filters, genetic algorithms, e-mail bombs and lawsuits — none have worked completely," Mr. Cartmell says. "An estimated 85 percent of the customers who presently sign up to SpamArrest already have spam filters installed on their computers or use services with spam filters built in, but because of the sheer number of spammers pushing their junk e-mail across the Internet, the filters can't keep up. As a result, e-mail users still find themselves inundated with spam."