Providian Financial uses Lotus Notes as its e-mail platform (as does R.R. Donnelley) for its 7,000 employees who have corporate e-mail accounts. CIO Tanni Graichen believes that choice has helped her escape the majority of computer viruses, as hackers target mostly Microsoft-based systems. "Most of the viruses so far have been geared toward systems with directory structures such as Microsoft Exchange. Lotus Notes seems much more protected," she says.

Providian’s e-mail servers handle between 120,000 and 150,000 internal messages on the average day, plus another 39,000 messages that come through the Internet. Graichen and her e-mail deputy, D’Arcy Tomlinson, have been able to reduce outside traffic significantly by using more than 30 spam filters.

Despite the fact that spam bedevils almost everyone in corporate America today, don’t expect legislation (such as the current Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001, H.R. 95) barring it to be passed into law any time soon. The reasons for that are complex. Although every U.S. company (indeed every man, woman and child with an e-mail account) must spend precious time and computing resources dealing with these unwanted messages, spam is not exactly top-of-mind.

According to Everett-Church, who is a member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, anti-spam activists are sorely out-funded by the pro-spam lobby, which includes large financial-services companies and the Direct Marketing Association. Even though an estimated 30 percent of the 30 million messages coming through the AOL network every day are spam, AOL Time Warner is not backing anti-spam legislation because it wants to reserve the right to send its own commercial messages, according to Everett-Church. Most of the other large ISPs feel the same, he says.

Everett-Church points out that it costs next to nothing to set up shop online, justifying the estimated positive spam response rate of well under 1 percent. "All the spammer needs is one or two hit rates per spam run and he’ll be happy. Sadly, there are at least one or two idiots per million people."

Executives of public companies don’t like to talk about spam, he says, because they don’t want the world to know just how much it costs them. "When part of your IT budget depends on whether Billy Bob in accounting signed up for a pyramid scheme, that’s not something they like to talk about," Everett-Church says. "With spam, it’s an ongoing guerilla war."

Viruses can also be curtailed by filtering out .exe and .vbs file attachments, and using two different antivirus software packages on the server and the desktop. That’s Naramore’s approach. He uses Norton Anti-Virus on the desktop and Fsecure on the server. However, teaching users to distrust all attachments remains a best practice.