LONDON-- The battle for the email inbox is heating up as spammers become more creative in their quest for our time and money. Likewise anti-spam systems are evolving to counter this ever-increasing conflict.

As the battle grows so do the casualties: businesses and individuals without adequate anti-spam protection are already counting the costs.

It is a constant race between the spammers and the spam defenders. "The battle is on and we are continually modifying our systems to defend our customers from this very annoying and costly problem" comments Steve Ball, Technical Director of an anti-spam software company, "over the last few years we have seen the techniques used by the spammers change and we have had to change to counter their attacks."

As the use of blackhole lists increased, many spammers switched to "zombie machines" (computers that have been taken over by a hacker, often through a trojan infection) so that the origin of the spam was not on a blackhole list. As header analysis improved spammers stopped caring that the origin of the email was hidden.

Today the spammers are switching to the use of animated graphics to prevent optical character recognition systems from reading the content of graphical images.

Why do the spammers go to so much trouble to get their message across? The answer is simple; many people still buy from spam. A recent survey by toptenreviews.com stated that 8 percent of spam recipients buy from spam email - making it very profitable!

The problem for businesses is that company time and money is being lost as employees not only open these emails, but read and respond to them as well.

The level of viruses on the internet, whilst still extremely high, has started to decline recently due to the increased number of people that have anti-virus protection. In order to curb the rise of email spam a similar approach is needed.

Estimates of the number of spam emails vary, but with the lowest figures quoted in excess of 12.5 billion emails being sent every day, in a business worth billions of dollars, this is a battle that will continue to rage.