Blackhole lists offer dark prospects.

A lawsuit charging Sprint with sending illegal, unsolicited e-mail appears to be turning into a test case for how much evidence a company can recover when defending against allegations of wrongful spamming.

Editorial. One man decides to give up on spam filtering.

A new report analyzing e-mail messages sent last month found that the problem of viruses and unsolicited e-mail continued to grow, hitting manufacturing, banking and finance, and health care particularly hard.

Fight is on to keep unwanted text ads off cell phones.

Telstra has hit back at anti-spam groups for abusing their power to block IP ranges.

Lunchtime finds the 29-year-old Scelson sitting cross-legged on the floor of his storefront TV repair shop while he munches on a takeout meal of boiled crawfish and spiced shrimp.

Shifting from daily nuisance to serious IT and business concern, uncontrolled spam is prompting customers to arm themselves with tools to fight back against productivity loss, potential liability and bandwidth-clogging consequences that unsolicited commercial e-mail can bring to an enterprise.

In the days before Christmas the amount of spam e-mail being sent and received looks set to soar as marketing machines and e-greetings firms go into seasonal overdrive.

Governor Gray Davis signs a bill that will prohibit the sending of spam to mobile phones and pagers starting next year.

Spam and Internet fraud -- the twin plagues of the information age -- are getting stepped-up attention from federal and state agencies that say more joint effort from law enforcement groups is needed to curb the scourge that is online swindling.

FTC goes after spam purveyors who peddle dubious schemes.

In the three seconds it takes to read this sentence, more than a half-million e-mails will land in in-boxes. By 2005, nearly that many will land each second. The e-mail avalanche knows no rank.

Research suggests one in fourteen emails received in the UK so far this year has been spam.

Think twice before sending a tartly worded e-mail or prepare for a battle of near-biblical proportions like the one being waged on Chicago computer consultant Bernard Shifman. [Requires free chicagotribune.com registration to view.]