Disclaimer: in the following blog post I will not be offering any creative solutions or constructive ideas. I have none.

From Panda Software comes the disheartening news that 90 per cent of all e-mail received by companies in May was spam. The stat was compiled from firms that use TrustLayer Mail, a managed security service run by Panda.

Now of course it must be said that Panda makes security and anti-virus software and therefore can benefit directly from increased hysteria about spam. But even if you want to argue that the company inflated its numbers, what does that leave us? Eighty per cent spam? Seventy? It's still awful. (And, by the way, I don't question the study's conclusion. Spam is such a problem that people hardly need to inflate it.)

Panda goes on to point out that spam not only wastes employee time (and goodness knows it does that) but spam can also contain malware. Worms from the Netsky family and Trojans from the SpamtaLoad family were the malware most frequently detected by TrustLayer Mail. Also seen often was the iFrame exploit, a piece of HTML code that tries to burrow through a vulnerability in Internet Explorer.

So this study gives us a better grasp of the problem, but so what? It's not like we can do anything about it. Oh, we can install defensive software (as Panda rightly suggests), we can pass laws against spammers, and we can rail about it in blogs and magazines, but ultimately there is nothing we can do to actually stop spam from being sent out.

That's because consumers respond to spam. It may only be one tenth of one per cent, but they do buy the stuff advertised, click on the link or send off their bank account info so those poor Nigerians can move about their millions.

So the real problem is stupid consumers, and as long as we have them we will have spam. And we will always have them.

If that seems like a downer conclusion, well...I did warn you at the beginning.

Peter Wolchak