By James McNair
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In the undemocratic hierarchy of the white-collar workplace, spam is the great equalizer.

It lands in the e-mail inboxes of workers who troll and shop the Internet on the job. It finds the managers whose e-mail addresses are splattered on company Web sites. And it nails the presidents and CEOs normally more secluded.

"I get an average of 100 e-mails a day and, out of those, I would estimate 75 percent or 80 percent are nothing but spam," said Rob Bransom, chairman and chief executive of Mycom Group in downtown Cincinnati.

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That's the going rate everywhere these days. In spite of software and services that detect, divert or block spam, junk e-mail has spread exponentially in the past four years. Postini, a Mountain View, Calif., company that sells e-mail security services, said spam content has soared from 5 percent of all e-mail in 1999 to about 75 percent today. In one 24-hour stretch, Postini's online spam tracker blocked 74,177,271 pieces of spam for its clients.

Spam has gotten so out of hand that states, including Ohio and Kentucky, can't sharpen the teeth in their anti-spam laws fast enough. The U.S. Senate unanimously passed its Can Spam Act last month, setting the stage for a House showdown with the direct marketing industry. California, meanwhile, passed the harshest spam law in the nation, authorizing fines of up to $1 million for each piece of unsolicited commercial mail. As a busy CEO, Bransom abhors spam. The irony is that his company makes spam-blocking software and sells it to 170 customers. His product, called MycomPro MailMax, routes users' e-mail to Mycom servers in Cincinnati, where it's quarantined unless users choose to read it. Bransom spends about 20 minutes a day, usually first thing in the morning, making sure that the blacklisted mail is genuine spam.

Today's spam scourge has made Bransom's routine a familiar one to anyone who uses a computer. Offers for mortgage refinancings, cheap prescriptions and sexual aids drown out legitimate e-mail and have turned what had been an enjoyable routine into a headache.

"I love e-mail," said Denise Bartick, CEO of Max Technical Training in Norwood. "I love communicating by e-mail and using it, but I'm concerned about what's going on because its effectiveness is being lessened by the spammers."

Bartick, whose company has 15 full-time employees, said she spends about 10 minutes a day deleting spam. She said about 70 percent of her 200 daily e-mails are unsolicited offers.

"If I don't recognize their name - and that's sometimes a problem - I delete it," she said. "Inevitably I delete something I received from a client, and they tell me, 'Denise, you didn't respond.' "

Eric Kornau, chief technical officer for Keyedge, a technology consulting organization in Pleasant Ridge, said one client had such a problem with spam that it changed its Internet domain name. He said the spammers expropriated its domain name and used it to send mass junk e-mail as if it had come from that company. The act, now a global phenomenon, is known as phishing. In its most harmful form, such spam is disguised as Microsoft software updates or eBay transmittals asking for credit card or other personal information.

"For maybe the past year, if I don't know where it came from, I delete it," Kornau said of his e-mail handling policy.

'It drives me crazy'

Like the most elusive game fish, spammers can be difficult to catch. Mycom, for one, has three developers working exclusively on MailMax product updates.

"There are people like myself that get an average of 100 spams a day, and if you have 1,000 people and each one of them wastes 10 or 15 minutes a day on it, it becomes a productivity issue as well as a bandwidth issue," Bransom said.

He added that spam has also become a concern for personnel officers because of the occasional pornographic content.

James Stegemeyer, a systems administrator for Convergys Corp., said he does his best to minimize the grief from spam.

"It drives me crazy," he said. "It makes me feel like doing something harsh with some of these people, but it's an uphill battle. They move around and go away. I've just gotten to the point of using products like invasion filters to get relief."

One remedy Stegemeyer doesn't want to see is some sort of heavy-handed, government-imposed registration requirement or the like for Internet usage.

"I'm for free speech," he said. "I don't want to throw out the Internet to get rid of the spammers."

E-mail jmcnair@enquirer.com.