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The company developed the technology in response to new tactics used by spammers. Specifically, spammers have been inserting links into e-mails instead embedding the spam message in the e-mail. As a result, traditional spam filters that scan the content of e-mail messages can't filter the unwanted messages. Cisco is the world's leader in networking equipment that shuttles Internet Protocol communications traffic around a corporate environment. Through several acquisitions, the company has also built a strong security portfolio. The IronPort acquisition is significant for Cisco mainly because it expands Cisco's security expertise beyond the network and allows it to offer products that also filter actual communications. This is especially important as new security threats emerge from a growing volume of spam.

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The 40-year-old sales executive from Los Angeles said he uses text messaging sporadically to contact friends, so he was extremely annoyed when he started getting text messages offering him a deal to buy or rent a time-share from Webuyresorts.com. Even though the unwanted messages were costing Paul 10 cents a pop, he said he wasn't as annoyed about the cost, because he had only received a few of these messages. Instead, he was concerned that his cell phone would soon be hijacked by marketers, including his own cell phone provider, contacting him with unwanted advertisements.

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The court also barred Spamhaus from causing any e-mail sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be "blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway" and ordered Spamhaus to publish an apology for that states that Linhardt and his company are not spammers, according to a copy of the order. "This ruling confirms e360insight's position that Spamhaus.org is a fanatical, vigilante organization that operates in the United States with blatant disregard for U.S. law," Linhardt wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com on Thursday. But Spamhaus is unfazed by the ruling. In a statement on its Web site, it dismissed the judgment as invalid and charges that the court was "bamboozled by spammers." Spamhaus didn't mount a defense in the case; the ruling was a default judgment in absence of counterarguments. "Default judgments obtained in US county, state or federal courts have no validity in the UK and can not be enforced under the British legal system," Spamhaus said on its Web site. "As spamming is illegal in the UK, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to UK law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."

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It's also a problem that has affected Gates personally. He said his home PCs have had malware, although he has personally never been affected by a virus. "I have had malware, (adware), that crap" on some home machines, he said.

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Among other things, the new bill prohibits the use of keystroke logging to collect personally identifiable information and the collection of Web browsing histories. It also bans software that takes control of a user's computer to send unauthorized e-mails or viruses. Computer code that modifies security settings also runs afoul of the new legislation.

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The bill approved by Barton's committee would require software makers to notify people before loading new programs on their machines that can collect information about them. Violators could face millions of dollars in fines.

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Officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who planned to announce the arrests in Washington on Thursday, told U.S. postal investigators they had received more than 10,000 complaints about unwanted e-mails sent by the company. The U.S. attorney in Detroit, Jeffrey Collins, was expected at Thursday's announcement.

Investigators said they consulted Dr. Michael D. Jensen, a medical professor at the Mayo Medical School, who confirmed that ingredients in the weight-loss product sold in the disputed e-mails wouldn't work.

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Ten years after Web surfers began using the spam label to describe intrusive online marketing, junk e-mail has ballooned into an epidemic of massive proportions. But righteous anger over the problem has increasingly been replaced by resignation. With no effective solution in sight, many people now ruefully wonder whether the "Internet era" might more accurately be dubbed the "age of spam."

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Yahoo has repeatedly discussed plans to support a proposed system, known as DomainKeys, for verifying the identity of an e-mail sender. AOL has recently begun testing a DNS-based system, formerly known as Sender Permitted From and recently renamed Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Microsoft, too, has developed its own system for identifying the origin of e-mail, called Caller ID for E-mail.

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"Aggressive moves by any large company against spammers who break the law are very welcome," said Stephen Cobb, senior vice president of ePrivacy Group, which this week released spam-fighting software for Internet service providers. "However...right now ISPs are telling us they see a lot of spam coming from Microsoft's own Hotmail servers, which are being abused by spammers. And a lot of people would probably say that would be the best place for the company to start cleaning up spam."

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Schumer's bill, however, is the only proposal so far in Congress that would let any "recipient adversely affected by a violation of this act" bring a lawsuit in state court that would recover statutory damages of up to $1,000 per e-mail message. Internet service providers would be immune from such lawsuits, and class action suits would not be permitted.

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The law would be enforced against those who use fraudulent practices to send bulk e-mail, commonly known as spam, to or from Virginia, a state that is headquarters for a number of major Internet providers, including the nation's largest, America Online.

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America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft on Monday sketched a broad outline that calls for technical changes to e-mail to make it more difficult to send the widely reviled messages. Among the steps are plans to hinder spammers from creating multiple fraudulent e-mail accounts in bulk and to determine the real identity of the senders.