Spam hardly needs an introduction. Anyone with an e-mail account knows the acute frustration of being inundated with offers of pills from virtual pharmacists, financial propositions from Nigerian princes and pictures for fetish sites that really, really shouldn’t exist. Spam has even gone beyond e-mail: like kudzu, it adapts to clog whatever online inbox you might choose.On Oct. 30, the social-networking site Facebook won a $711 million judgment against the self-proclaimed “Spam King” Sanford Wallace. Wallace, a professional e-mail marketer from New Hampshire who also likes to be called Spamford, used ill-gotten passwords to surreptitiously log into user accounts for the purpose of sending advertisements to their list of friends. But Wallace isn’t alone. Despite myriad legal and technological attempts to combat it, spam will cost firms an estimated $130 billion worldwide in 2009 in lost productivity and technical costs, according to Ferris Research.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1933796,00.html