Tomlinson points with hope, but some exasperation, to alternate -- some would say competing -- proposals for stemming the tide of offensive, malicious and deceptive e-mail.

"It's not so much a hard technical problem; it's a hard business and political problem," Tomlinson says. "The players have vested interests in the various approaches, and they are fighting tooth and nail to get their approaches adopted. It's not the end users who are the bottleneck here."

Microsoft Corp. is pushing its Sender ID Framework, which verifies that a message was actually sent from a server authorized to send mail for the domain owner. John Scarrow, Microsoft's general manager of antispam and antiphishing strategy, says Sender ID has been adopted by 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies and is used for 31 percent of all e-mail messages.

"We are seeing the amount of spam now starting to plateau," he says. "It's a good indication the industry is starting to take a good bite out of the economics of the business."

More good news, Scarrow says, is that while IM and other modes of electronic communication also need to be protected, the technology for doing so is similar to that for e-mail.